PHANTASIES OF STYLE AND PLACE
Promises: A Tale of the City Imperishable
A story about a place I love, and wish I could have revisited. I managed two novels, Trial of Flowers and Madness of Flowers, and a few shorts. This world always wanted more.
Girl
She’d had a name, when she was little. All children did, even if it was just Grub or Little Jo or Sexta. But for some living on the brawling streets of the City Imperishable, names were like cloaks, to be put on and taken off. And for some, a name might be cut away like a finger crushed beneath a cartwheel, lest rot set in.
The lash cracked past Girl’s ear, so close she felt the sting, though without the burn of a rising welt.
This time.
Girl held her pose splayed against the wall, dipping her chin as best she could with her face pressed against the rough stone. She waited while Sister Nurse studied her. Right now, there were five of them under Sister Nurse’s care. Each of them was named Girl. Each of them was taller than the broken hinge set in the wall stub along Pyrrhea Alley. Each of them was shorter than the rusted iron post in front of the Fountain of Hope where the alley let out on Hammer Lane. That was how long they had under Sister Nurse’s care, from hinge to post. It was the way of things in the Tribade.
“What’s your name?” Sister Nurse asked, looking up from just below Girl’s feet.
“Girl,” she whispered, though a woman’s voice in her head spoke another name.
“Where are you bound?”
It was the catechism, then. “From hinge to post.”
“You’ve my count of thirty to gain the roof,” Sister Nurse said.
Not the catechism after all. Girl scrambled, knowing the task to be impossible—there were at least five body lengths of wall above her, and the other Girls had been climbing quickly while she was stopped for questioning.
She came to a window at Sister Nurse’s slow eleven. Scrambling up the side of the frame, it occurred to Girl that Sister Nurse had changed the rules. She was no longer climbing the wall, she was gaining the roof.
With no more thought than that, Girl tumbled into a dusty room. The lash cracked against the window frame, but missed the soles of her bare feet. She scrambled, taking up the count in her own head, looking for stair or ladder before time ran out and she was beaten bloody for both failure and insubordination.
Never again, she told herself. Not while she drew breath.
* * *
Each of the Girls had made a scourge. The six of them, for there had been six at the time, had gone into the River Saltus to land a freshwater shark. One Girl had been bitten so badly she was taken away bloody-stumped and weeping, never to return. The rest skinned their kill, cured the strange, rough hide, and cut it into long strips for braiding. They used human shinbones, found or harvested at their own discretion—Girl had cut hers from a three-day-old corpse—for the handles. The sharkskin braids were anchored to the handles by copper windings. Those, mercifully, had been provided, though Girl supposed only because the City Imperishable lacked mines for them to descend into.
She’d wound her old name into her handle, setting gaps in the copper in the places where the letters might have fallen. It was a code known only to Girl, a secret message from her former self to her future self in memory of silent promises of revenge and betterment. “You are you,” she’d said, a message being drawn out of her with red-hot tongs by the Sisterhood.
Whenever Sister Nurse landed a blow or cut across her back, her neck, her ass, her thighs, Girl knew it was with the power of her lost name behind it.
She’d never asked the other Girls if they’d somehow done the same. Perhaps they bled in vain. She did not.
* * *
The Tribade did indeed beat her bloody before a fire that roared in an iron grate. The metal glowed like eyes in the darkness of a summer night. Skin came away in narrow red flecks, while sisters shouted at her. Is this your name? Who are you? Why are you here?
“Girl,” she told them, until she could no longer move her jaw. That was all she said, no matter what they asked her. She would give them no satisfaction. Instead she remembered every cut and blow, for the future.
In time Sister Nurse cut Girl down and slung her across her neck like a haunch of meat. They trudged through moonlit streets, surrounded by beggars and whores and night soil men, none of whom lifted a face dark or pale to acknowledge Girl as she watched the world upside down through blood-dimmed eyes.
Stairs after that, stairs on stairs on stairs. They were climbing the Sudgate, the great, monstrous, empty castle which anchored the southwestern wall of the City Imperishable, brooding over the river and the poorest districts and the vine-wrapped forests that slunk away to the south. She could tell from the scent of the dust, too—this was cold stone crumbled with age and disuse, not scattered dirt and flakes of skin and pollen borne on bright winds from beyond the walls.
Even if Sister Nurse had remained still and silent, Girl would have known where she was. Then, and always.
On the roof—a roof, rather, for the Sudgate was ramified and ramparted like some palace of dream—the moonlight was almost violet. The heavy grease-and-shit scent of the Sudgate Districts moiled below them somewhere, miscegenating with night humors off the Saltus and whatever flowed down from the Heliograph Hill and the Limerock Palace. Sister Nurse set Girl down so that they stood on a narrow ledge, looking back across the City Imperishable to the north and east as a curious, abrasive wind plucked at them both.
The great ranging complex of the Limerock Palace in the middle distance was the most obvious structure. Gilded and tiled domes of the Temple District gleamed in the moonlight. The Rugmaker’s Cupola on Nannyback Hill punctuated the northern horizon, its candy-striped walls shadow-on-shadow now. Smokestacks and factories and mansions and commercial buildings stood all across the City Imperishable. This close to the top of the Sudgate, they were as high up as all but the tallest of the buildings and hilltops.
Sister Nurse said a name. It was a familiar name, one borne by hundreds of female children in the City Imperishable. It was the name worked into the handle of her scourge. Girl said nothing, did not even blink or turn to face the half-familiar sound.
“Are you taller than the post?” Sister Nurse asked.
At that, Girl turned and looked. Her own length of leg had not grown in the last day or two.
“Are you taller than the post?”
As always, there was no hint what the question might actually mean. Sister Nurse set exercises, asked questions, made demands, meted out punishments. Waking up each day was always reward enough. It meant she had a future.
It was more than some had, in the alleys and flophouses and mucky attics of her part of the city.
“Are you taller than the post?”
No question was ever asked more than thrice.
“I am taller than the City Imperishable,” Girl said.
Sister Nurse smiled. “Then you are free, if you can fly away.”
This was something new, something outside the boundaries of pain and promise. Girl looked down at the tiled roof sloping sharply away from the ledge beneath her feet, the angle so steep that the missing pieces were scarcely visible. It was a hundred body lengths and more to the pavement of the wallside alley.
“But I have not been given wings,” she whispered.
“Then we have failed you.”
It took Girl a moment to understand what had just been said. Not that she had failed, but that Sister Nurse, and the Tribade, had failed her.
I will not back down, she told herself. Girl spread her arms, stared at the pale moon a moment, whispered a name, and toppled forward into empty air and the broken-toothed mouth of the cobbles far below.
Little Mother
“Run it again, Little Gray Sister,” urged Sister Architect.
She considered that. The baby shifted in her belly, making her heavy as a cotton bale, and just as ungainly. There had been pains in her groin, too, pushing the edge of what was permissible. She could not lose the child, but she could not lose herself either.
Little Gray Sister looked over at her partner in this effort. It was another rooftop, another nighttime, another Tribadist, but she was very much in mind of the night she’d been reborn. “It’s not a matter of trust,” she said. “Nor casting away.”
“No…” Sister Architect smiled, her eyes glimmering in the pale moonlight. “Pride, I suppose. You’ve already made your goal.” Her goal, in this case, was a scale across the rooftops from the bakery on Forth Street to the Cambist’s Hall on Maldoror Street a block over, and there up the false steeple on the old Water Bureau office to make the jump across Maldoror and down to the edge of the Limerock Palace’s south wall. From there, it was trivial to slip over the wall and enter the building—the real work was in the run up and the leap, the parkour-pace practiced to deadly precision by the Gray Sisters among the Tribade. The false steeple was one of the two or three hardest runs practiced by the sisterhood.
To run the false steeple days before a baby was due was the hardest way to make the run. No one could scale and jump with her usual speed and precision while her belly was distended and full of sloshing life.
Little Gray Sister had, and fetched out the Third Counselor’s privy seal to prove it. Not for the sake of the theft—the Tribade had their own copy of the seal, accurate right down to the wear marks along the left edge and the three nicks in the bottom petal of the rose—but for the sake of doing the thing.
Pregnant and due.
In this moment she was already minor legend. If she did what Sister Architect suggested, and she succeeded, her legend would grow.
“Vanity,” said Little Gray Sister, leaning backward to ease her spine. “I have already proven all that I need to.”
“Hmm.” Sister Architect sounded disappointed, but did not press her case. “Perhaps you are not quite so much flash as some of the younger sisters claim you are.”
Another test, she realized. But true. There were many kinds of sisters in the Tribade—red, white, blue, black, and more. Sister Architect was a blue sister, one of the professions, though her skills were mostly put to plotting and revising the rooftop runs, rather than any new construction.
Only the grays were trained to die and to kill. Only the grays were given the bluntest and sharpest weapons and trusted to use them. Only the grays were trained between hinge and post in secrecy and ignorance, that their true mettle might be known.
Only the gray sisters became Big, Bigger, or Biggest Sisters, to lead the Tribade into the uncertain future.
She smiled with pride at the thought.
Her abdomen rippled, a muscle spasm that caught Little Gray Sister by surprise so that she sucked in her breath.
Sister Architect tugged at her arm. “Sister Midwife awaits within the Quiet House.”
“I—” Little Gray Sister stopped cold, fighting a wave of pain so intense it roiled into nausea. She took a deep, long breath. “Yes.”
* * *
Big Sister—like all Big Sisters, a gray sister—sat on the edge of Little Gray Sister’s cot. Big Sister was almost a heavy woman, unusual in the Tribade, with roan hair fading to sandy gray and glinting gray eyes. “You’re a mother now,” she said. “Would you like to see the baby?”
Little Gray Sister had thought long and hard on that question. Her breasts ached for the child, weeping a pale bluish fluid. Her loins felt shattered. Even her blood seemed to cry out for her offspring.
Like everything, this was a test, though of late she had been her own examiner more and more. “I would, but I shan’t,” she told Big Sister.
Big Sister took Little Gray Sister’s hand in her own, clenched it tightly. “You can, you know,” she whispered.
Little Gray Sister fancied she heard a burr in Big Sister’s voice, some edge of old emotion. It was possible—the Tribade were neither monsters nor ghosts, just women of a certain purpose living within the walls of the City Imperishable. “I could hold her—” She stopped again, realizing she didn’t even know if she’d birthed a boychild or a girl.
A girl, she decided. The baby had been a girl. Just as she had been, once.
“I could hold her, but I do not think I could let her go.”
“And would that be so bad?” The emotion in Big Sister’s voice was almost naked now, a shift from control to a raw wound that might be decades old.
She held on to that hurt, knowing she must own it too, if she were ever to set things right. “Not bad, Big Sister, not if it were my ambition to take the red and care for her myself, or even train among the Sisters Nurse.”
“Well.” Big Sister’s voice was controlled once more. “Will you take the hardest way, then?”
That was the other choice. The Tribade had many sisters of the brown, the street toughs and money bosses. They shook down good merchants and shook down bad merchants far more, kept rival gangs in line, maintained some semblance of order in streets and districts where bailiffs were rarely seen. Those women were the most public of the hidden faces of the Tribade, and they did most of the public work.
Little Gray Sister could run rooftops, tackle criminals, and watch over her city for the rest of her life as a brown sister. But the only way to become a Big Sister, a Bigger Sister, or even—and especially—the Biggest Sister, was to take the hardest way.
She cupped her leaking breasts in her hand, regretting the feeling of both tenderness and joy. There had been a man at them once, too, for a few hours, the night she’d gotten with child amid tearing pain and weeping and a strange, shivering joy. She still wondered who he was sometimes, but at least he’d been kind.
“I am ready.”
“I’ll send for the fire and the knife.”
“The ink, too, please,” Little Gray Sister said. “I’d prefer to have it all at once.”
An expression flickered across Big Sister’s face—unreadable, save for context. Most women waited for the healing before they took the ink. Tattooing the Soul’s Walk across the flat, puckered scars on a Big Sister’s chest was one of the greatest rites of the Tribade. It was also one of the most painful, for the poppy given for the fire and the knife was not given for the ink.
Little Gray Sister would do it the hard way, cutting away her womanhood in the first blush of mothering to join the ranks of the sisters who protected their world.
Still, she was surprised they had the brazier ready, and the long knife, and there was even no wait at all for Sister Inker.
Someone had known. Perhaps all of them had known. Just like they’d known to be standing on the rooftop just below, the night she’d jumped into the violet moonlight.
Even though it was the Quiet House, her screams set dogs barking three streets away. It was the only time in her life Little Gray Sister screamed.
Big Sister
She looked at the long, narrow velvet bag Biggest Sister handed her. The two of them were in a rooftop cafe in the Metal Districts, a place where women in gray leather with close-cropped hair received no special scrutiny. There was an electrick lamp on the table which buzzed and crackled, shedding pallid light against the evening’s gloom. The wind was cool, bearing mists and distant groaning booms off the River Saltus.
“You know there is one more test,” Biggest Sister said. The woman was compact, a walking muscle more reminiscent of a bull terrier than the fine ladies of Heliograph Hill.
“There is always one more test.” Big Sister shrugged. Even now, a year and a moon after, her chest ached whenever it was chill, or when she moved certain ways. Sometimes she awoke with the pain of her breasts still full of milk, and for that brief muzzy instant between sleep and alertness treasured the feeling, false though it was. Never again kept slipping into the future. “Life is one more test,” she added.
“Yes, yes, that’s what we tell the girls. It makes nice philosophy for them to whisper over after lights-out. But really, life is for living. After this, only you will set yourself to more.”
“Have you ever stopped setting tests for yourself?” she asked Biggest Sister.
“No.” Biggest Sister smiled. “But my Sister Nurse always did say I was a fool and a dreamer.”
Big Sister held the bag. She already knew what was in it, just by the feel—her old sharkskin scourge. With her old name coiled in copper round the handle.
“There’ve been three sisters to take the hardest way these past two years,” said Biggest Sister. She folded her hands around a cup of kava, but did not lift it to her lips. “Four have gone to rest beneath the stones, and one has taken the blue in deference to her age.” The cup twirled slowly in her hand. “I am sure you have studied arithmetic.”
“Yes,” said Big Sister. “I can count.”
“We are not dying away, far from it.” Another twirl. “We are at some danger of losing the edge of our blade, becoming in time nothing more than an order of monials ministering to the poor and the victims of the state.”
“And if we did not run bawd houses and guard the dark pleasure rooms and take money from the cash boxes of the petty merchants?”
Biggest Sister sipped this time before answering. “We protect, and we aid. That is not the same thing as bettering. If we did not do these things, someone else would. Someone else always will. Someone male, who does not care for women, who will not trim the balls off men who prey on children and break the pelvises of whores. Someone who will simply count the money and throw a few more bodies to the sharks. And they would not give hospice or teach beggar children to read or make sure the potshops have meat in the soup kettles.”
They would not beat bloody the girls growing between hinge and post, either, Big Sister thought, but she kept her words within. As she had always known, there was a sad wisdom to everything the Tribade did.
“There is… more,” Biggest Sister said. “You have not reached this lore yet, but believe me, there is more. Much sleeps beneath stones and behind walls in this City Imperishable that is not seen in daylight. And for good reason. Along with others, we guard those secrets. Only the Big Sisters, though. And you must pass this final test before your title is more than honor.”
Big Sister drew the sharkskin scourge from its bag. Though it loomed huge in her memories, the thing seemed small in her hand. A toy, almost. She’d used worse straining at pleasure with some of the other sisters who had a taste for the rough trade.
But never used such a thing on a child.
“This,” Big Sister began, then stopped. She took a deep breath. Her hand shook as it held the scourge. “This is what is wrong with us.”
“No.” There was an infinite, awful gentleness in Biggest Sister’s voice. “That is what is wrong with the world, that we must raise some of our Girls so in order to be strong enough to stand against it.”
They were quiet a moment as a waiter passed with a basket of hot rolls, spiced with cardamom and sea salt. He didn’t see the scourge lying in Big Sister’s hand, and he never would. It was why some among the Tribade met here to talk from time to time.
“Hear me now: there is a greater wrong to come,” said Biggest Sister. “This last test. A distillation of our way. You must give life before you can take it. This you have done. You must take life before you can have power over the life and death of others. You must kill for the City Imperishable, for the Tribade, for yourself.”
“With this?” Big Sister asked. “It would be a sad and messy business.”
“With that. So you come full circle, releasing the last of your name.” Biggest Sister put down her mug. “If you do not come to do this thing, you will still be a Big Sister. In other times you would have remained a Gray Sister, but our need is too great. But you will never rise to Bigger or Biggest Sister, and you will never see the inner secrets that we guard. And you will never wield the blade against someone’s neck, either in your hand or by your word.” She stood. “Come to me when the thing is done. Tonight, or half a lifetime from now, come to me.”
“What thing? Who am I to kill?” Big Sister hated the fear that trembled in her tones.
“The child who you would have been,” said Biggest Sister. Her voice was distant as the unknown sea. “Bring me the head of a girl-child, that you have killed yourself, and you are done with tests forever. Beggar or daughter of a Syndic’s house, it makes no matter to me.”
She was gone then, her cup shivering slightly on the tabletop.
Big Sister walked to the edge of the rooftop, where a wrought-iron railing worked in a pattern of roses and snakes marked the drop. She stood there, watching a pair of heavy horses draw a scrap cart quietly through the late streets. The moon was slim this night, but still it washed the streets in a purpled silver.
There were a hundred thousand people in the City Imperishable, she thought. A third of them must be children. Half of those would be girls. Would a hive miss a single bee? Would a tree miss a single apple?
Her breasts ached, and she thought she felt milk flowing across the spiral tattooed scars as she wept in the moonlight. There was no way to stop this save to become what she hated most, no way to keep promises made to herself in the earliest days save to break them with blood.
It was not what was wrong with the Tribade, it was what was wrong with the world.
Slowly she picked at the copper windings on the haft of the scourge. The name of that young girl smaller than the hinge dropped away as flashings into the street below, where beggars swept daily for the scrap. She picked until she’d forgotten forever the name, and with it the promises, and there were no more tears in her eyes to follow the copper down.
Big Sister dropped over the railing to a three-point landing on the cobbles. If she was going to hunt a girl, the child would be taken from the highest, greatest houses in the City Imperishable. No mere beggar was going to die for her.
And then, never again, she promised herself. Big Sister ignored the hollow echo she could hear ringing from the future.
A story about a place I love, and wish I could have revisited. I managed two novels, Trial of Flowers and Madness of Flowers, and a few shorts. This world always wanted more.
Girl
She’d had a name, when she was little. All children did, even if it was just Grub or Little Jo or Sexta. But for some living on the brawling streets of the City Imperishable, names were like cloaks, to be put on and taken off. And for some, a name might be cut away like a finger crushed beneath a cartwheel, lest rot set in.
The lash cracked past Girl’s ear, so close she felt the sting, though without the burn of a rising welt.
This time.
Girl held her pose splayed against the wall, dipping her chin as best she could with her face pressed against the rough stone. She waited while Sister Nurse studied her. Right now, there were five of them under Sister Nurse’s care. Each of them was named Girl. Each of them was taller than the broken hinge set in the wall stub along Pyrrhea Alley. Each of them was shorter than the rusted iron post in front of the Fountain of Hope where the alley let out on Hammer Lane. That was how long they had under Sister Nurse’s care, from hinge to post. It was the way of things in the Tribade.
“What’s your name?” Sister Nurse asked, looking up from just below Girl’s feet.
“Girl,” she whispered, though a woman’s voice in her head spoke another name.
“Where are you bound?”
It was the catechism, then. “From hinge to post.”
“You’ve my count of thirty to gain the roof,” Sister Nurse said.
Not the catechism after all. Girl scrambled, knowing the task to be impossible—there were at least five body lengths of wall above her, and the other Girls had been climbing quickly while she was stopped for questioning.
She came to a window at Sister Nurse’s slow eleven. Scrambling up the side of the frame, it occurred to Girl that Sister Nurse had changed the rules. She was no longer climbing the wall, she was gaining the roof.
With no more thought than that, Girl tumbled into a dusty room. The lash cracked against the window frame, but missed the soles of her bare feet. She scrambled, taking up the count in her own head, looking for stair or ladder before time ran out and she was beaten bloody for both failure and insubordination.
Never again, she told herself. Not while she drew breath.
Each of the Girls had made a scourge. The six of them, for there had been six at the time, had gone into the River Saltus to land a freshwater shark. One Girl had been bitten so badly she was taken away bloody-stumped and weeping, never to return. The rest skinned their kill, cured the strange, rough hide, and cut it into long strips for braiding. They used human shinbones, found or harvested at their own discretion—Girl had cut hers from a three-day-old corpse—for the handles. The sharkskin braids were anchored to the handles by copper windings. Those, mercifully, had been provided, though Girl supposed only because the City Imperishable lacked mines for them to descend into.
She’d wound her old name into her handle, setting gaps in the copper in the places where the letters might have fallen. It was a code known only to Girl, a secret message from her former self to her future self in memory of silent promises of revenge and betterment. “You are you,” she’d said, a message being drawn out of her with red-hot tongs by the Sisterhood.
Whenever Sister Nurse landed a blow or cut across her back, her neck, her ass, her thighs, Girl knew it was with the power of her lost name behind it.
She’d never asked the other Girls if they’d somehow done the same. Perhaps they bled in vain. She did not.
The Tribade did indeed beat her bloody before a fire that roared in an iron grate. The metal glowed like eyes in the darkness of a summer night. Skin came away in narrow red flecks, while sisters shouted at her. Is this your name? Who are you? Why are you here?
“Girl,” she told them, until she could no longer move her jaw. That was all she said, no matter what they asked her. She would give them no satisfaction. Instead she remembered every cut and blow, for the future.
In time Sister Nurse cut Girl down and slung her across her neck like a haunch of meat. They trudged through moonlit streets, surrounded by beggars and whores and night soil men, none of whom lifted a face dark or pale to acknowledge Girl as she watched the world upside down through blood-dimmed eyes.
Stairs after that, stairs on stairs on stairs. They were climbing the Sudgate, the great, monstrous, empty castle which anchored the southwestern wall of the City Imperishable, brooding over the river and the poorest districts and the vine-wrapped forests that slunk away to the south. She could tell from the scent of the dust, too—this was cold stone crumbled with age and disuse, not scattered dirt and flakes of skin and pollen borne on bright winds from beyond the walls.
Even if Sister Nurse had remained still and silent, Girl would have known where she was. Then, and always.
On the roof—a roof, rather, for the Sudgate was ramified and ramparted like some palace of dream—the moonlight was almost violet. The heavy grease-and-shit scent of the Sudgate Districts moiled below them somewhere, miscegenating with night humors off the Saltus and whatever flowed down from the Heliograph Hill and the Limerock Palace. Sister Nurse set Girl down so that they stood on a narrow ledge, looking back across the City Imperishable to the north and east as a curious, abrasive wind plucked at them both.
The great ranging complex of the Limerock Palace in the middle distance was the most obvious structure. Gilded and tiled domes of the Temple District gleamed in the moonlight. The Rugmaker’s Cupola on Nannyback Hill punctuated the northern horizon, its candy-striped walls shadow-on-shadow now. Smokestacks and factories and mansions and commercial buildings stood all across the City Imperishable. This close to the top of the Sudgate, they were as high up as all but the tallest of the buildings and hilltops.
Sister Nurse said a name. It was a familiar name, one borne by hundreds of female children in the City Imperishable. It was the name worked into the handle of her scourge. Girl said nothing, did not even blink or turn to face the half-familiar sound.
“Are you taller than the post?” Sister Nurse asked.
At that, Girl turned and looked. Her own length of leg had not grown in the last day or two.
“Are you taller than the post?”
As always, there was no hint what the question might actually mean. Sister Nurse set exercises, asked questions, made demands, meted out punishments. Waking up each day was always reward enough. It meant she had a future.
It was more than some had, in the alleys and flophouses and mucky attics of her part of the city.
“Are you taller than the post?”
No question was ever asked more than thrice.
“I am taller than the City Imperishable,” Girl said.
Sister Nurse smiled. “Then you are free, if you can fly away.”
This was something new, something outside the boundaries of pain and promise. Girl looked down at the tiled roof sloping sharply away from the ledge beneath her feet, the angle so steep that the missing pieces were scarcely visible. It was a hundred body lengths and more to the pavement of the wallside alley.
“But I have not been given wings,” she whispered.
“Then we have failed you.”
It took Girl a moment to understand what had just been said. Not that she had failed, but that Sister Nurse, and the Tribade, had failed her.
I will not back down, she told herself. Girl spread her arms, stared at the pale moon a moment, whispered a name, and toppled forward into empty air and the broken-toothed mouth of the cobbles far below.
Little Mother
“Run it again, Little Gray Sister,” urged Sister Architect.
She considered that. The baby shifted in her belly, making her heavy as a cotton bale, and just as ungainly. There had been pains in her groin, too, pushing the edge of what was permissible. She could not lose the child, but she could not lose herself either.
Little Gray Sister looked over at her partner in this effort. It was another rooftop, another nighttime, another Tribadist, but she was very much in mind of the night she’d been reborn. “It’s not a matter of trust,” she said. “Nor casting away.”
“No…” Sister Architect smiled, her eyes glimmering in the pale moonlight. “Pride, I suppose. You’ve already made your goal.” Her goal, in this case, was a scale across the rooftops from the bakery on Forth Street to the Cambist’s Hall on Maldoror Street a block over, and there up the false steeple on the old Water Bureau office to make the jump across Maldoror and down to the edge of the Limerock Palace’s south wall. From there, it was trivial to slip over the wall and enter the building—the real work was in the run up and the leap, the parkour-pace practiced to deadly precision by the Gray Sisters among the Tribade. The false steeple was one of the two or three hardest runs practiced by the sisterhood.
To run the false steeple days before a baby was due was the hardest way to make the run. No one could scale and jump with her usual speed and precision while her belly was distended and full of sloshing life.
Little Gray Sister had, and fetched out the Third Counselor’s privy seal to prove it. Not for the sake of the theft—the Tribade had their own copy of the seal, accurate right down to the wear marks along the left edge and the three nicks in the bottom petal of the rose—but for the sake of doing the thing.
Pregnant and due.
In this moment she was already minor legend. If she did what Sister Architect suggested, and she succeeded, her legend would grow.
“Vanity,” said Little Gray Sister, leaning backward to ease her spine. “I have already proven all that I need to.”
“Hmm.” Sister Architect sounded disappointed, but did not press her case. “Perhaps you are not quite so much flash as some of the younger sisters claim you are.”
Another test, she realized. But true. There were many kinds of sisters in the Tribade—red, white, blue, black, and more. Sister Architect was a blue sister, one of the professions, though her skills were mostly put to plotting and revising the rooftop runs, rather than any new construction.
Only the grays were trained to die and to kill. Only the grays were given the bluntest and sharpest weapons and trusted to use them. Only the grays were trained between hinge and post in secrecy and ignorance, that their true mettle might be known.
Only the gray sisters became Big, Bigger, or Biggest Sisters, to lead the Tribade into the uncertain future.
She smiled with pride at the thought.
Her abdomen rippled, a muscle spasm that caught Little Gray Sister by surprise so that she sucked in her breath.
Sister Architect tugged at her arm. “Sister Midwife awaits within the Quiet House.”
“I—” Little Gray Sister stopped cold, fighting a wave of pain so intense it roiled into nausea. She took a deep, long breath. “Yes.”
Big Sister—like all Big Sisters, a gray sister—sat on the edge of Little Gray Sister’s cot. Big Sister was almost a heavy woman, unusual in the Tribade, with roan hair fading to sandy gray and glinting gray eyes. “You’re a mother now,” she said. “Would you like to see the baby?”
Little Gray Sister had thought long and hard on that question. Her breasts ached for the child, weeping a pale bluish fluid. Her loins felt shattered. Even her blood seemed to cry out for her offspring.
Like everything, this was a test, though of late she had been her own examiner more and more. “I would, but I shan’t,” she told Big Sister.
Big Sister took Little Gray Sister’s hand in her own, clenched it tightly. “You can, you know,” she whispered.
Little Gray Sister fancied she heard a burr in Big Sister’s voice, some edge of old emotion. It was possible—the Tribade were neither monsters nor ghosts, just women of a certain purpose living within the walls of the City Imperishable. “I could hold her—” She stopped again, realizing she didn’t even know if she’d birthed a boychild or a girl.
A girl, she decided. The baby had been a girl. Just as she had been, once.
“I could hold her, but I do not think I could let her go.”
“And would that be so bad?” The emotion in Big Sister’s voice was almost naked now, a shift from control to a raw wound that might be decades old.
She held on to that hurt, knowing she must own it too, if she were ever to set things right. “Not bad, Big Sister, not if it were my ambition to take the red and care for her myself, or even train among the Sisters Nurse.”
“Well.” Big Sister’s voice was controlled once more. “Will you take the hardest way, then?”
That was the other choice. The Tribade had many sisters of the brown, the street toughs and money bosses. They shook down good merchants and shook down bad merchants far more, kept rival gangs in line, maintained some semblance of order in streets and districts where bailiffs were rarely seen. Those women were the most public of the hidden faces of the Tribade, and they did most of the public work.
Little Gray Sister could run rooftops, tackle criminals, and watch over her city for the rest of her life as a brown sister. But the only way to become a Big Sister, a Bigger Sister, or even—and especially—the Biggest Sister, was to take the hardest way.
She cupped her leaking breasts in her hand, regretting the feeling of both tenderness and joy. There had been a man at them once, too, for a few hours, the night she’d gotten with child amid tearing pain and weeping and a strange, shivering joy. She still wondered who he was sometimes, but at least he’d been kind.
“I am ready.”
“I’ll send for the fire and the knife.”
“The ink, too, please,” Little Gray Sister said. “I’d prefer to have it all at once.”
An expression flickered across Big Sister’s face—unreadable, save for context. Most women waited for the healing before they took the ink. Tattooing the Soul’s Walk across the flat, puckered scars on a Big Sister’s chest was one of the greatest rites of the Tribade. It was also one of the most painful, for the poppy given for the fire and the knife was not given for the ink.
Little Gray Sister would do it the hard way, cutting away her womanhood in the first blush of mothering to join the ranks of the sisters who protected their world.
Still, she was surprised they had the brazier ready, and the long knife, and there was even no wait at all for Sister Inker.
Someone had known. Perhaps all of them had known. Just like they’d known to be standing on the rooftop just below, the night she’d jumped into the violet moonlight.
Even though it was the Quiet House, her screams set dogs barking three streets away. It was the only time in her life Little Gray Sister screamed.
Big Sister
She looked at the long, narrow velvet bag Biggest Sister handed her. The two of them were in a rooftop cafe in the Metal Districts, a place where women in gray leather with close-cropped hair received no special scrutiny. There was an electrick lamp on the table which buzzed and crackled, shedding pallid light against the evening’s gloom. The wind was cool, bearing mists and distant groaning booms off the River Saltus.
“You know there is one more test,” Biggest Sister said. The woman was compact, a walking muscle more reminiscent of a bull terrier than the fine ladies of Heliograph Hill.
“There is always one more test.” Big Sister shrugged. Even now, a year and a moon after, her chest ached whenever it was chill, or when she moved certain ways. Sometimes she awoke with the pain of her breasts still full of milk, and for that brief muzzy instant between sleep and alertness treasured the feeling, false though it was. Never again kept slipping into the future. “Life is one more test,” she added.
“Yes, yes, that’s what we tell the girls. It makes nice philosophy for them to whisper over after lights-out. But really, life is for living. After this, only you will set yourself to more.”
“Have you ever stopped setting tests for yourself?” she asked Biggest Sister.
“No.” Biggest Sister smiled. “But my Sister Nurse always did say I was a fool and a dreamer.”
Big Sister held the bag. She already knew what was in it, just by the feel—her old sharkskin scourge. With her old name coiled in copper round the handle.
“There’ve been three sisters to take the hardest way these past two years,” said Biggest Sister. She folded her hands around a cup of kava, but did not lift it to her lips. “Four have gone to rest beneath the stones, and one has taken the blue in deference to her age.” The cup twirled slowly in her hand. “I am sure you have studied arithmetic.”
“Yes,” said Big Sister. “I can count.”
“We are not dying away, far from it.” Another twirl. “We are at some danger of losing the edge of our blade, becoming in time nothing more than an order of monials ministering to the poor and the victims of the state.”
“And if we did not run bawd houses and guard the dark pleasure rooms and take money from the cash boxes of the petty merchants?”
Biggest Sister sipped this time before answering. “We protect, and we aid. That is not the same thing as bettering. If we did not do these things, someone else would. Someone else always will. Someone male, who does not care for women, who will not trim the balls off men who prey on children and break the pelvises of whores. Someone who will simply count the money and throw a few more bodies to the sharks. And they would not give hospice or teach beggar children to read or make sure the potshops have meat in the soup kettles.”
They would not beat bloody the girls growing between hinge and post, either, Big Sister thought, but she kept her words within. As she had always known, there was a sad wisdom to everything the Tribade did.
“There is… more,” Biggest Sister said. “You have not reached this lore yet, but believe me, there is more. Much sleeps beneath stones and behind walls in this City Imperishable that is not seen in daylight. And for good reason. Along with others, we guard those secrets. Only the Big Sisters, though. And you must pass this final test before your title is more than honor.”
Big Sister drew the sharkskin scourge from its bag. Though it loomed huge in her memories, the thing seemed small in her hand. A toy, almost. She’d used worse straining at pleasure with some of the other sisters who had a taste for the rough trade.
But never used such a thing on a child.
“This,” Big Sister began, then stopped. She took a deep breath. Her hand shook as it held the scourge. “This is what is wrong with us.”
“No.” There was an infinite, awful gentleness in Biggest Sister’s voice. “That is what is wrong with the world, that we must raise some of our Girls so in order to be strong enough to stand against it.”
They were quiet a moment as a waiter passed with a basket of hot rolls, spiced with cardamom and sea salt. He didn’t see the scourge lying in Big Sister’s hand, and he never would. It was why some among the Tribade met here to talk from time to time.
“Hear me now: there is a greater wrong to come,” said Biggest Sister. “This last test. A distillation of our way. You must give life before you can take it. This you have done. You must take life before you can have power over the life and death of others. You must kill for the City Imperishable, for the Tribade, for yourself.”
“With this?” Big Sister asked. “It would be a sad and messy business.”
“With that. So you come full circle, releasing the last of your name.” Biggest Sister put down her mug. “If you do not come to do this thing, you will still be a Big Sister. In other times you would have remained a Gray Sister, but our need is too great. But you will never rise to Bigger or Biggest Sister, and you will never see the inner secrets that we guard. And you will never wield the blade against someone’s neck, either in your hand or by your word.” She stood. “Come to me when the thing is done. Tonight, or half a lifetime from now, come to me.”
“What thing? Who am I to kill?” Big Sister hated the fear that trembled in her tones.
“The child who you would have been,” said Biggest Sister. Her voice was distant as the unknown sea. “Bring me the head of a girl-child, that you have killed yourself, and you are done with tests forever. Beggar or daughter of a Syndic’s house, it makes no matter to me.”
She was gone then, her cup shivering slightly on the tabletop.
Big Sister walked to the edge of the rooftop, where a wrought-iron railing worked in a pattern of roses and snakes marked the drop. She stood there, watching a pair of heavy horses draw a scrap cart quietly through the late streets. The moon was slim this night, but still it washed the streets in a purpled silver.
There were a hundred thousand people in the City Imperishable, she thought. A third of them must be children. Half of those would be girls. Would a hive miss a single bee? Would a tree miss a single apple?
Her breasts ached, and she thought she felt milk flowing across the spiral tattooed scars as she wept in the moonlight. There was no way to stop this save to become what she hated most, no way to keep promises made to herself in the earliest days save to break them with blood.
It was not what was wrong with the Tribade, it was what was wrong with the world.
Slowly she picked at the copper windings on the haft of the scourge. The name of that young girl smaller than the hinge dropped away as flashings into the street below, where beggars swept daily for the scrap. She picked until she’d forgotten forever the name, and with it the promises, and there were no more tears in her eyes to follow the copper down.
Big Sister dropped over the railing to a three-point landing on the cobbles. If she was going to hunt a girl, the child would be taken from the highest, greatest houses in the City Imperishable. No mere beggar was going to die for her.
And then, never again, she promised herself. Big Sister ignored the hollow echo she could hear ringing from the future.
Testaments
Sometimes you just have to let the language rip. This is me, wide open.
The Testament of the Six Sleeping Kings is bound in ebon plates so dark that they drink all light that flows before them. Brilliance born in the fires of the sun, taking a thousand years to rise to the surface and eight minutes to leap across the stygian depths of space from the daystar to the humble Earth, only to be swallowed with the same finality as any rattling blade dropped upon a shuddering, aristocratic neck.
These are the hard truths: Some words were never meant to be read. Some thoughts cannot be undone. Some darknesses shall never be dispelled.
Some people will never believe these truths.
The First Sleeping King
In a time before countries had borders, when birds filled the skies like raindrops in a storm, and the great migrations of the beasts had not yet been halted by walls and fences and fields, there lived a man named Linnel, youngest son to Ezar. In a hard land of withered olive trees, struggling cedars, salty ponds, and miles of sere rocky hills, he was born to no great consequence, son of an ageing goatherd and the second of his father’s three wives.
His first-mother, Aranu, had already forgotten herself and lay within her tent of hides moaning, except when she wandered smeared with shit and ashes to search for a baby who had died half a lifetime before Linnel’s birth. His third-mother, Raha’el, had been a servant girl taken on more out of pity than need, then bound in marriage to stop the gossip about his father’s undeniable concupiscence. His second-mother, who had carried Linnel into the world, was Aranu’s much-younger cousin, Tobeth, who stood midway in years between her co-wives.
Thus Linnel had grown up beneath Ezar’s hard hand—for goats are unforgiving, and their masters learn this from the animals themselves—burying Aranu when he was nine years of age and finding his way into Raha’el’s bed when he was twelve.
All in all, an unremarkable childhood in that time and place before the morning of the world had been set by those who first chose to keep time.
Until the dream came.
It was the dawn of his fourteenth birthday. Raha’el had celebrated with Linnel the night before, suckling him to her breast and calling him her best child until Linnel’s staff had hardened enough for him to be her biggest man instead. As always he took her in the manner of a boy so there would be no chance of get. After she’d wrung her pleasures from her son, Raha’el had sent him away, lest Ezar be forced to take notice of these nocturnal excursions. No one was fooled, but the niceties were kept.
Except that morning Linnel lay on a goathide amid a meadow of tiny night-blooming flowers. Already they shut their pale colors and delicate scents away against the first hot breeze of day trickling down from the stony hills to the east. A light descended from the sky in a stink of brimstone and old ash.
Linnel sat up, startled, all too conscious of Raha’el’s passion still glistening on his thighs and amid the downy fuzz of his beard. A torch, thrown by an invader? He was unprepared for anything except a wash in the goats’ pond. Cursing, he realized even his sling was in his tent, too far to reach now.
But a torch would have fallen with the speed of any stone, and this light drifted like a wind-born seed.
Linnel, said a voice out of the very air itself.
“Aranu?” It was all he could think, that his first-mother had found her way out from beneath the stones of her grave in search of her lost infant.
—Malakh.
Linnel realized he heard a name. It meant “messenger” in the tongue of a people who sometimes traded with Ezar for goats, but this being of light was clearly not one of the She’m. Uncertain if this was an ancestor or a spirit of the air or some creature whose nature had never been communicated to him, the boy dropped on one knee.
“I serve.”
—Fire.
With that word, Malakh told Linnel a story, a tale which raged inside his head, of the birth of the world from boiling rocks hotter than even the heart of a smith’s fire, of rains which quenched the land until storms of steam and vapor finally ceased, of the intention which made plants and trees, then birds and beasts, and finally rising like a pomegranate tree from spilled seeds, people themselves, fire’s great-great-grandchildren.
“I know,” Linnel said, and wondered if he dared address this being more directly.
—Honor.
With that word, he knew what must come next. Such a power in the world deserved respect, fear even, and substance; not the soiled thrustings and small betrayals of a family forever encamped on the hillsides of this land.
“I obey.”
Opening his eyes, Linnel strode back into their camp and took up his father’s thornwood staff where it lay propped outside Ezar’s tent. He used the aging tool as a weapon to restore honor to himself and the Messenger of the fire. He almost turned away from his course when he saw Raha’el’s blood fresh upon her heaving breasts as she screamed her last, but her dying curse propelled Linnel to his father’s tent with his resolve renewed.
“The path must be made ready that people will know who stands above us,” he told the three fresh graves, hasty cairns assembled before a puzzled audience of wary goats. “We must know our sins before we can repent of them.”
Eating of a withered apple, Linnel strode away from his bleating charges toward the more fertile lands lower down and coastwise, already framing the words of his tale that people might properly understand their import.
His steps slowed for a moment when he began to wonder if the being of light had been a dream or a true sending, but the sacrifice was made. He was committed. Dream or no dream, this was his path.
* * *
The angel’s pen nib was wrought of the stuff of stars, a metal so dense and fierce that it could almost fold space around itself. The ink it used was distilled from the blood of a dozen dozen saints—what use sinners, when they are as common as sand at the seashore, and thus of no import at all? The parchment was stripped from the hide of a broken god, stretched and scraped on frames of living bone.
The Second Sleeping King
Massah often walked in dreams. He had learned to do this long before he realized it was any trick at all. Even as the smallest child there had been the steps taken on chubby, uncertain feet amid the veiled ladies of the royal court; and there had been the steps that unfolded before his inner eye, sleepwalking on clouds and the backs of crocodiles and the memories of the day.
The mystery and miracle had arrived for Massah when he finally understood that almost no one around him did this thing. Pten, the withered old priest who always smelled of grave dust and bird droppings, certainly had the secret. They’d even met, in the other lands. There, Pten was a broad-chested young man with skin the color of old tea. Much more handsome than the pasty, hollow youth the priest had doubtless once been.
Pten always frowned at Massah, knowing him for a dreamwalker, but had not then sorted out who he was in the waking world. Massah, on the other hand, knew who it was he met in dreams. Always, and without fail.
So when he met the Angel of Death come for the woman who had raised Massah as though he were her own son, he knew enough not to try to bar the other’s path. At the same time, Massah could not help but bid the stranger tarry a while, his secret hope to spare his mother a few more moments of life’s breath.
“I know your errand,” he told the angel.
The other looked at him with empty eyes. Like all the messengers of God, it was as perfect as a marble statue, slick-pale and unblemished, but its gaze was just as blank. The angel wore no armor except that of his studied magnificence, clad only in stone-hard skin and the regard of a distant deity. Even the sword of legend was absent.
—All men know my errand, at least at the end of their days. The angel’s voice was as devoid of passion as its expression was.
“All men are born to die,” Massah replied. He was ever polite. Impolite people did not long remain behind the shaded walls and rambling bowers of the royal court. “Only a fool pretends otherwise.”
—Why does this fool pretend to converse with me, then?
“I bargain for nothing but a few moments of your time. In payment I offer my own wit. Among some circles I am accounted a more than passing conversationalist.”
—She will not live a heartbeat longer. A tinge of pity might have stained its voice.
Massah was ashamed then, and even afraid. “It was never my intention to waste your time, lord angel.”
—All of time is the lord God’s. None will ever be wasted.
The angel touched the side of Massah’s head with a cold finger heavier than any stone.
—Go back to your court and look beyond its walls, if you would see the price of life and the value of death.
When Massah awoke he was forced to swallow his screams. He stumbled to the basin to banish the taste of embalming herbs from his mouth. In his reflection upon the water, Massah saw that his dark, curly hair had become white and brittle and straight where the angel had touched him. All thoughts of his mother fled him in the face of the strangeness of that gift from the angel of death.
He rose in time from his ablutions and subsequent meditations to don a heavier pair of sandals and a roughspun robe, and pass outside the royal court through the gate called Envy, and into the bustling streets and marketplaces beyond.
There in the city of kings he found a world he’d always known of, but never considered with sufficient care. The people of his birth labored under great loads of clay and straw, sweating more than the donkeys of the merchants. Even the poorest of the kingdom were free to spit upon the slaves. Many did so, simply to find a moment when they could call their own lot better than another’s.
Massah had been raised among the scent of lemons and the coolth of fountains. Now, his sandals slapping the dusty clay and worn cobbles of the streets, he realized that he had always been only a pet to the princesses and concubines who had dressed him in versions of princely raiment and taught him to twist his tongue in honeyed speech much as the smoothest courtiers did.
A joke.
A monkey, trained to ape his betters for the amusement of the women of the royal court.
Why had he never seen this in all his dreamwalking?
Because he’d been ashamed of the poor, starveling dreams of slaves.
He began to run, the smack of his sandals slapping against the stones of the city that had always sheltered him. Massah sprinted past obelisks and the blank faces of temples and fly-clouded ossuaries and clay pits where his countrymen worked naked in the rending heat. He raced as if he could outrun the very touch of the angel gone past.
On his return to the royal court, a death was being cried.
Of course.
His mother.
The priests demanded to know where Massah had been. Old Pten nodded with a dark leer. Long conversations were held in small, hot rooms. A senior prince stormed in, and Massah thought he might die then on a bronze blade, but the prince departed again as temple gongs began to echo across the palaces of the royal court.
In time, he was left alone with his thoughts. Massah understood what the angel of death had shown him. Every people had their time under the brassy gaze of heaven. He could forestall the doom of none. But he could change the price of life.
He dreamed again, of rivers of blood and rains of frogs and the stilled heartbeats of every firstborn son in the city. Walking in dreams, Massah made it so in the hot lands of the waking world, until the streets themselves cried as never he had for his mother’s death.
* * *
The angel wrote in a language possessing only one word, though that word was of infinite length. All the syllables of creation echoed in the letters it scratched across the weeping pages. They did not remain static as ink on vellum might, but writhed in their own private torments, recalling the souls rendered to make them so.
The Third Sleeping King
The Bridgebuilder was a man out of his place. He’d been raised by Attic tutors among marbled halls on a hilltop overlooking a glass-green sea. He’d learned the classics, he’d studied rhetorics and logic and law and the histories of empire. He’d answered questions and stood for examinations and dutifully learned the arts of sword, shield, spear, and horse. In short, the Bridgebuilder had been forged to be the sort of man needed in every corner of the empire.
Then the Senate had sent him to a land he’d never meant to visit, to rule over a people with no sense of their needs, only a burning, passionate purpose transcending all reason.
Out of place, even out of time, he sometimes thought. Certainly the Bridgebuilder lived in a palace, but it was so unlike the wind-whispered halls of his youth. His servants were for the most part sullen would-be poisoners kept in line only by the ever-present guards. The land itself rejected the empire, with short harvests and failing fisheries and blights on the olive groves and date palms, so even the most hard-hearted tax gatherer came back with chests half empty.
People who have nothing can pay nothing. It was a lesson these fools had taken to heart, until the Bridgebuilder began to wonder if they had fouled their own wells out of sheer, raw spite.
His only relief came in the light wine that was made up in the hills and shipped down to the lowlands in resinous casks. The flavor reminded him of the piney ferments the servants of his youth drank, which was fine with the Bridgebuilder. He had no pretensions to be anything other than a hopeless colonial, unworthy of the exacting standards of the Eternal City, whose empire he served. He would never sit in the Senate, or aspire to a voice at the emperor’s ear.
He just wished mightily that he was anywhere but this miserable post.
Even the nights were hot through most of the seasons. The Bridgebuilder would take his resinous wine and two or three of the serving girls and retire to his apartments on the roof of the palace. There he would command them to bathe him with sponges soaked in watered vinegar. After that he would command them to bathe one another. There was always room among his silks for an extra girl, and as the people of this place hated his virtues as much as they hated his vices, the Bridgebuilder indulged himself regardless.
One girl in particular he had favored for a handful of seasons—Saleh. She was willing to lie with him in whatever manner pleased him. On nights when he was too far gone in wine to know his own mind, she would lie with him in whatever manner pleased her. And she was never jealous of any favor he showed to other girls. Best of all, she would hold him when the weeping came upon him, and whisper him to sleep with counsels which felt wise in the watches of the night, whatever his morning wit might later make of them.
So it was that Saleh came to be his confidante in matters of state. Often as not, he wept for sheer frustration, once the wine had done its work. They curled together amid billowing curtains and the salt smell of the nearby ocean as she listened, and spoke, and listened.
“Is that priestly council your master?” she asked him one time during a particularly difficult bout of religious revivalism among the occupied peoples.
The Bridgebuilder waved off the suggestion. “No, no, I serve only the demands of empire. My orders come by courier aboard fast galleys, not from a bushel of black-robed schemers on their temple steps.”
“Of course,” Saleh said. She kissed his ears, nibbling on the edges as he loved so much. “So their words are as the barking of dogs to you, yes?”
“Yes,” he said, sighing. “I mean, no. No. I cannot simply order them to act. I do not have soldiers enough to dictate from every street corner.”
“So you are beholden to their goodwill.” Something glinted in her voice, an edge he had not often heard—or noticed—before.
“Never.” Pride stirred within him, a sluggish beast long put to sleep by the sheer unreasonableness of this place.
“You are the lion of this land,” Saleh told him. Her hand, oiled now, slipped down to once more seek proof of his manly worth. “Do not let them shave your mane.”
Later, lost in restless sleep, the Bridgebuilder was visited by two men from out of time. One had the seeming of a savage, freshly descended from some blood-soaked mountaintop. The other was a man of courtly bearing, wrapped in the grave-pale linens of Egypt long past.
—You deserve your name, the savage said.
—And the joy of your position, added his companion.
They spoke in a sort of chorus:
—Do not judge for the rabble. That is no better than choosing between two rotten fruits. When you are done, you still have only rotten fruit to show for your labors.
“Who are you?” he asked.
—Sleeping kings of old.
Not my kings, the Bridgebuilder thought, but he had too much respect for the power of the dream to speak thusly.
Soon after, he refused to hear a case. A man was set to die for some pointless heresy, and the Bridgebuilder could have freed him. “The choice of rotten fruits does not appeal to me,” he haughtily told the delegation of local priests. Saleh had smiled at him from the shadows, but he never saw her again.
In time, the Bridgebuilder realized that she, too, had been part of the dream; prophecy gone wrong without him ever knowing how to set it to rights.
* * *
The angel recorded as faithfully as only one of its kind could do. Mindless in their devotion, they were not made to question. That was the province of men and women, those failed echoes of the creator. Words twisted as much as they ever had, crossing the bridge of meaning between intent and actuality. Still, the page held them.
The Fourth Sleeping King
The maid buckled her armor. She was so very tired. The messenger angels did not come so much anymore. It had all been so clear in the years before she’d picked up a sword. Voices in the hayloft, visions of light by night. God spoke through His servants and she listened.
She was the maid. This was the way of things.
Now she was accounted an enemy even by the very people she’d saved. The invaders from across the water, of course, said terrible things of her. The maid knew to expect that. Scullery girls argued in the same fashion. In a way, it was an honor to have her name on the lips of enemy nobles. She was the only woman they did not ignore.
But her own countrymen had turned away from her as well. Their hate bloomed the red-gold colors of mounting flames as surely as the leaves turned away from summer when autumn stole across the forests. This she could not understand. Had she not pressed the fight at Orléans and Jargeau? Had she not saved the very life of the Duke of Alençon?
There was the truth, of course. To be saved by a woman was more disgraceful than to have been defeated by a man. Their ears were open to the charges whispered from across the water, spread in those places where the armies met and mingled on saints’ days, in whores’ beds, at market towns, around council tables.
God had not forsaken her, but her own people had.
Still, she wore these good greaves and chain over a surcoat. Still, she had the helmet dented by a dozen arrows, each turned away in the last moment by an angel’s hand, even while those closest to her fell. Still, she had this sword. The ultimate blasphemy, far beyond the worried mutterings of the priests—that a woman should take up the most male of weapons and prove herself able to cut and thrust her way into the body of the enemy soldiers and their army alike.
With that thought, she sat to oil and whet her blade. This had not been in the morning’s plan. Mist rose off the fields outside her tent, the smell of horses and campfires, the little sounds of an army waking to a battle day. Even the sound of footsteps echoing on stone was not enough to deter her from her task, though it reminded her that the rest of this was memory, or dream.
Stroke the blade. Metal gleamed in the oil, a false brilliance which dried all too soon, but for a while made this a sword of heaven. The whicking sound of the whetstone against the edge. The heft of the pommel, more familiar to her now than the hand of any of the lovers she’d never taken in her years among men. The rotten straw reek of the cell where she knew she slept, even as the dream-sword found its edge.
—There is no more to be done.
She stiffened, the sword falling away from her hand even though there was no clangor of the blade striking the ground. The stuff of dreams, as real as it had been. This was the first time the Lord’s host had spoken to her in… how long? “I am content,” the maid lied.
—No one is content facing their end.
“The end of my life on earth is but the beginning of my place in heaven,” she replied piously. Though in truth, she’d long doubted that as well. Too many of the men she’d killed were simply men. Not demons or devils, but ordinary persons with wives and children, who ate too much and farted and slept uneasily and cursed their serjeants and prayed upon their knees to the same God she did.
Could she truly climb to heaven on a stairway made of the corpses of men who’d died with the Lord’s name upon their lips?
—Yes. Of course the angel could hear her thoughts.
With that the maid once more knew this for a dream. The messenger spoke in the words of the enemy, which was not so different from her own Frankish speech, but always before they had whispered to her in the writhing tongue of angels, which is far more like the stirring of snakes in some nest, or the rising of a locust horde, than any simple words from the mouth of a woman or man.
Had the conversations always been dreams?
—Yes, the angel said again.—But what does it matter? The world is but a dream of God. You will be a king in the history of this dream.
“A king in death?” she asked aloud. “Surely a queen.”
—No simpering queen drew on armor and sword, the angel told her reproachfully.
Queens do not simper, the maid thought, and turned her face away until she tasted straw in her mouth and awoke to a bright morning with the memory of a sword’s heaviness on her lap. The gaze of the priest before her smoldered, and the maid knew she, too, would soon smolder.
* * *
The angel paused in its labors. Its kind were Divine intent, in the most literal sense, and so the purposes of the Tetragrammaton were never a mystery. Still, the words spreading from its pen introduced an unheralded glimmer of doubt.
Doubt was heresy, doubt was the casting out, a star fallen from the crystal heavens to the deepest lake of ice far beneath the middle world of God’s creation. Shrugging off the unaccustomed sense, the angel resumed its toils.
The Fifth Sleeping King
The old man sat amid the willow trees and stared out across the Potomac. The waters of the river ran muddy, almost oily, seeming tired as they slipped home toward the sea. He’d been many things. The cicadas in the trees hummed the story of his life.
Planter.
Surveyor.
Soldier.
Political.
General.
President.
“But never king,” he told the approaching night. In truth, surveyor had always been his favorite.
—Of course you were a king.
The old man looked up at the voice, which had carried over the cycling buzz of the insects. An angel stood before him—of this he had no doubt, for all his lifetime of tepid faith. Not recognizing this creature as one of God’s messengers would be like not recognizing the ocean as being made of water.
It stood before him, a composite of mist off the river and the singing of slaves and the smell of the smokehouse and a few swirling leaves caught up in the hem of its robe. The old man knew he was dreaming then, but knew also that this, alone among all the dreams of his lifetime, was more real than even his waking moments.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I went to some trouble never to be crowned.”
—Kingship is not a matter of a circlet upon the brow. There was something almost prim in the angel’s tone.
A question stole unbidden from his mouth. “Is my time at hand?” He was immediately ashamed of the fear that had asked it.
—I am not that messenger. Kindliness guttered in the angel’s eyes, warming coals for the cold hands of the old man’s soul.
He resolved to ask no more questions. That revelation should choose to come to him in the sunset of his days was no more, or less, surprising than any of the other things which had overtaken the old man down the now-vanished years. “I thank you for the visit, at least. Most who come to see me want something. Asking, always asking.”
—I ask nothing of you that you do not ask of yourself. The angel moved, drawing the wind with it as a cloak, so the waters of the Potomac stirred in a way that would have alarmed any waterman.
“I ask nothing of myself.” Children, thought the old man. Issue of his loins. A swift ending to the fractured mess the politics of his young nation had already become. A brake for the pride of those who had succeeded him in office both high and low. “Though sometimes I ask much of the world,” he admitted with the same ruthless self-honesty that had so often been a stumbling block in his life.
The angel bent before him. Kneeling?—Here is the secret of your life, it whispered in a voice of willow leaves and the whippoorwill. When it began to speak again, all the old man heard was the dank, close sound of darkness, and the fading of Martha’s crying. He stared at his trembling hands and wondered how long she would mourn him.
* * *
The pen scratched on. Scribing, scrying, painting futures in the ink of the past, though all time was one from the vantage of the angel’s copydesk. It had recovered its equilibrium. Angels were pendulums, marking the endless moments of the mind of God, messengers bridging the ineluctable gap between perfected intent and the imperfect matter of Creation.
It had never questioned why God, who was all things everywhere, should require a book to record His doings, or the doings of His creation. It is not the nature of angels to question, only to answer. It is not the nature of angels to devise, only to record.
The Sixth Sleeping King
What the hell was the matter with people? No respect, that was it. His mother had been right. No one ever listened to him like they should.
The man who had been commander in chief poured himself another drink. He wasn’t supposed to, had given it up years ago so far as anyone knew. The gap between what he said he did and what he actually did had ceased to matter so long ago that the ex–commander in chief rarely considered it anymore. What he said, what he believed, was the truth. The messy details were just that: messy details. No one’s business.
Disappointment, that was it. So many things which should have happened never did. Promises from Scripture and politics alike had been betrayed by niggling traitors. No one saw his goodness, his rectitude. Not even Laura, who’d always stood beside him, shrouding her thoughts in a smile.
He really ought to have married a girl like Mom. A man could rule the world with a woman like that at his side. Daddy had, damn him.
The ice in his glass clinked like the fall of coins. The outside sweated cold and heavy. He knew then he was dreaming, he really hadn’t touched a drink in years. Not really. Not that counted. The ex–commander in chief simply didn’t stand around mixing a highball.
He had people to do it for him.
Even in his dreams, a man had to laugh at himself.
A young fellow in a suit stepped close. Dark skinned, but not obviously any particular kind of colored. The ex–commander in chief didn’t recognize the guy, though he wore the regulation gray suit and translucent earpiece.—Sir. The fellow’s voice slipped through another layer of dreaming into a space of soaring naves and thundering sermons and the safe, blind glory of prayer.
“This is about the red heifer, isn’t it?” Where had that come from? He wasn’t supposed to talk about it. The glory would come, in his lifetime, he’d been promised. He knew.
—Sir. Something hung in the fellow’s eyes, expectant as a launch code.
He felt his breathing grow shallow and hard. “Is it time?” The promise, it was coming to pass!
—Sir.
A familiar peevishness rose inside him, that his handlers had so long fought to banish. Too bad for them, he was the boss here. Always would be. Didn’t matter how he got to the top, nope. He was here now and not climbing down. No sir. “What is it,” the ex–commander in chief demanded. “Speak up!”
—Sir. The voice sounded haunted, as if coming from an empty hallway far away.
He tried to shake off his dream, to wake up gasping amid the sheets. He hated the feeling of being wrapped in self-doubt, and always shed it as quickly as he could. Mother said too much thinking was bad for a man. The ex–commander in chief had learned to trust his gut. Facts changed depending on who brought them to you. Feelings were the hard truths.
Right now he was feeling very worried indeed.
—Sir. A terrible fire blossomed behind the fellow’s gaze. The ex–commander in chief threw his drink at the flames, but they only passed outward along the arcs of liquid and ice and shattered glass until his dream was consumed by fire and a great voice echoed from the heavens, asking him if this was truly what he intended.
Still, he did not doubt himself. Not him. Nope. No sir.
* * *
The angel finally set aside its pen. The book was done, or would be until it was opened again. Words were the oldest, greatest magic. God had spoken in the beginning, and He would someday unspeak the end, swallowing Creation down in a sweeping blur of undoing: oaks shrinking to acorns; cold cinders swelling first to red giants, then reduced to their starry births; old men climbing from graves to step backwards to life until they climb puling and mewing back to the salty delta from which each had first flowed.
As done, undone. As lived, unlived. Time, helical, alive, autophagic, endless as a circle, with as many corners as an egg.
All of this best stated in the language of dreams. Consciousness was too linear for even the angel itself to properly comprehend the sweeping swirl of God’s Creation. How so for His poor creatures of clay and sweat and breath?
It smiled, preening a moment, feeling a rare sense of accomplishment before moving on to the next task: to bear the book away so it might someday be read.
The Seventh King
She is just a girl. She doesn’t know her parents, though there are people who live in her house and clothe her and feed her and call her by a name not her own. At night a favorite uncle crawls out of the wainscoting, thin as a shadow, heavy as a star, and whispers to her the dreams of sleeping kings long dead.
Someday she will be so famous that they will have to write down her dreams. When she grows into her power and announces her true name, darkness will settle like a cloak, bringing the nighttime of the soul to all those who have plunged her into darkness.
Which is to say, all of everyone.
For now, dreaming is enough. There is no higher truth.
Sometimes you just have to let the language rip. This is me, wide open.
The Testament of the Six Sleeping Kings is bound in ebon plates so dark that they drink all light that flows before them. Brilliance born in the fires of the sun, taking a thousand years to rise to the surface and eight minutes to leap across the stygian depths of space from the daystar to the humble Earth, only to be swallowed with the same finality as any rattling blade dropped upon a shuddering, aristocratic neck.
These are the hard truths: Some words were never meant to be read. Some thoughts cannot be undone. Some darknesses shall never be dispelled.
Some people will never believe these truths.
The First Sleeping King
In a time before countries had borders, when birds filled the skies like raindrops in a storm, and the great migrations of the beasts had not yet been halted by walls and fences and fields, there lived a man named Linnel, youngest son to Ezar. In a hard land of withered olive trees, struggling cedars, salty ponds, and miles of sere rocky hills, he was born to no great consequence, son of an ageing goatherd and the second of his father’s three wives.
His first-mother, Aranu, had already forgotten herself and lay within her tent of hides moaning, except when she wandered smeared with shit and ashes to search for a baby who had died half a lifetime before Linnel’s birth. His third-mother, Raha’el, had been a servant girl taken on more out of pity than need, then bound in marriage to stop the gossip about his father’s undeniable concupiscence. His second-mother, who had carried Linnel into the world, was Aranu’s much-younger cousin, Tobeth, who stood midway in years between her co-wives.
Thus Linnel had grown up beneath Ezar’s hard hand—for goats are unforgiving, and their masters learn this from the animals themselves—burying Aranu when he was nine years of age and finding his way into Raha’el’s bed when he was twelve.
All in all, an unremarkable childhood in that time and place before the morning of the world had been set by those who first chose to keep time.
Until the dream came.
It was the dawn of his fourteenth birthday. Raha’el had celebrated with Linnel the night before, suckling him to her breast and calling him her best child until Linnel’s staff had hardened enough for him to be her biggest man instead. As always he took her in the manner of a boy so there would be no chance of get. After she’d wrung her pleasures from her son, Raha’el had sent him away, lest Ezar be forced to take notice of these nocturnal excursions. No one was fooled, but the niceties were kept.
Except that morning Linnel lay on a goathide amid a meadow of tiny night-blooming flowers. Already they shut their pale colors and delicate scents away against the first hot breeze of day trickling down from the stony hills to the east. A light descended from the sky in a stink of brimstone and old ash.
Linnel sat up, startled, all too conscious of Raha’el’s passion still glistening on his thighs and amid the downy fuzz of his beard. A torch, thrown by an invader? He was unprepared for anything except a wash in the goats’ pond. Cursing, he realized even his sling was in his tent, too far to reach now.
But a torch would have fallen with the speed of any stone, and this light drifted like a wind-born seed.
Linnel, said a voice out of the very air itself.
“Aranu?” It was all he could think, that his first-mother had found her way out from beneath the stones of her grave in search of her lost infant.
—Malakh.
Linnel realized he heard a name. It meant “messenger” in the tongue of a people who sometimes traded with Ezar for goats, but this being of light was clearly not one of the She’m. Uncertain if this was an ancestor or a spirit of the air or some creature whose nature had never been communicated to him, the boy dropped on one knee.
“I serve.”
—Fire.
With that word, Malakh told Linnel a story, a tale which raged inside his head, of the birth of the world from boiling rocks hotter than even the heart of a smith’s fire, of rains which quenched the land until storms of steam and vapor finally ceased, of the intention which made plants and trees, then birds and beasts, and finally rising like a pomegranate tree from spilled seeds, people themselves, fire’s great-great-grandchildren.
“I know,” Linnel said, and wondered if he dared address this being more directly.
—Honor.
With that word, he knew what must come next. Such a power in the world deserved respect, fear even, and substance; not the soiled thrustings and small betrayals of a family forever encamped on the hillsides of this land.
“I obey.”
Opening his eyes, Linnel strode back into their camp and took up his father’s thornwood staff where it lay propped outside Ezar’s tent. He used the aging tool as a weapon to restore honor to himself and the Messenger of the fire. He almost turned away from his course when he saw Raha’el’s blood fresh upon her heaving breasts as she screamed her last, but her dying curse propelled Linnel to his father’s tent with his resolve renewed.
“The path must be made ready that people will know who stands above us,” he told the three fresh graves, hasty cairns assembled before a puzzled audience of wary goats. “We must know our sins before we can repent of them.”
Eating of a withered apple, Linnel strode away from his bleating charges toward the more fertile lands lower down and coastwise, already framing the words of his tale that people might properly understand their import.
His steps slowed for a moment when he began to wonder if the being of light had been a dream or a true sending, but the sacrifice was made. He was committed. Dream or no dream, this was his path.
The angel’s pen nib was wrought of the stuff of stars, a metal so dense and fierce that it could almost fold space around itself. The ink it used was distilled from the blood of a dozen dozen saints—what use sinners, when they are as common as sand at the seashore, and thus of no import at all? The parchment was stripped from the hide of a broken god, stretched and scraped on frames of living bone.
The Second Sleeping King
Massah often walked in dreams. He had learned to do this long before he realized it was any trick at all. Even as the smallest child there had been the steps taken on chubby, uncertain feet amid the veiled ladies of the royal court; and there had been the steps that unfolded before his inner eye, sleepwalking on clouds and the backs of crocodiles and the memories of the day.
The mystery and miracle had arrived for Massah when he finally understood that almost no one around him did this thing. Pten, the withered old priest who always smelled of grave dust and bird droppings, certainly had the secret. They’d even met, in the other lands. There, Pten was a broad-chested young man with skin the color of old tea. Much more handsome than the pasty, hollow youth the priest had doubtless once been.
Pten always frowned at Massah, knowing him for a dreamwalker, but had not then sorted out who he was in the waking world. Massah, on the other hand, knew who it was he met in dreams. Always, and without fail.
So when he met the Angel of Death come for the woman who had raised Massah as though he were her own son, he knew enough not to try to bar the other’s path. At the same time, Massah could not help but bid the stranger tarry a while, his secret hope to spare his mother a few more moments of life’s breath.
“I know your errand,” he told the angel.
The other looked at him with empty eyes. Like all the messengers of God, it was as perfect as a marble statue, slick-pale and unblemished, but its gaze was just as blank. The angel wore no armor except that of his studied magnificence, clad only in stone-hard skin and the regard of a distant deity. Even the sword of legend was absent.
—All men know my errand, at least at the end of their days. The angel’s voice was as devoid of passion as its expression was.
“All men are born to die,” Massah replied. He was ever polite. Impolite people did not long remain behind the shaded walls and rambling bowers of the royal court. “Only a fool pretends otherwise.”
—Why does this fool pretend to converse with me, then?
“I bargain for nothing but a few moments of your time. In payment I offer my own wit. Among some circles I am accounted a more than passing conversationalist.”
—She will not live a heartbeat longer. A tinge of pity might have stained its voice.
Massah was ashamed then, and even afraid. “It was never my intention to waste your time, lord angel.”
—All of time is the lord God’s. None will ever be wasted.
The angel touched the side of Massah’s head with a cold finger heavier than any stone.
—Go back to your court and look beyond its walls, if you would see the price of life and the value of death.
When Massah awoke he was forced to swallow his screams. He stumbled to the basin to banish the taste of embalming herbs from his mouth. In his reflection upon the water, Massah saw that his dark, curly hair had become white and brittle and straight where the angel had touched him. All thoughts of his mother fled him in the face of the strangeness of that gift from the angel of death.
He rose in time from his ablutions and subsequent meditations to don a heavier pair of sandals and a roughspun robe, and pass outside the royal court through the gate called Envy, and into the bustling streets and marketplaces beyond.
There in the city of kings he found a world he’d always known of, but never considered with sufficient care. The people of his birth labored under great loads of clay and straw, sweating more than the donkeys of the merchants. Even the poorest of the kingdom were free to spit upon the slaves. Many did so, simply to find a moment when they could call their own lot better than another’s.
Massah had been raised among the scent of lemons and the coolth of fountains. Now, his sandals slapping the dusty clay and worn cobbles of the streets, he realized that he had always been only a pet to the princesses and concubines who had dressed him in versions of princely raiment and taught him to twist his tongue in honeyed speech much as the smoothest courtiers did.
A joke.
A monkey, trained to ape his betters for the amusement of the women of the royal court.
Why had he never seen this in all his dreamwalking?
Because he’d been ashamed of the poor, starveling dreams of slaves.
He began to run, the smack of his sandals slapping against the stones of the city that had always sheltered him. Massah sprinted past obelisks and the blank faces of temples and fly-clouded ossuaries and clay pits where his countrymen worked naked in the rending heat. He raced as if he could outrun the very touch of the angel gone past.
On his return to the royal court, a death was being cried.
Of course.
His mother.
The priests demanded to know where Massah had been. Old Pten nodded with a dark leer. Long conversations were held in small, hot rooms. A senior prince stormed in, and Massah thought he might die then on a bronze blade, but the prince departed again as temple gongs began to echo across the palaces of the royal court.
In time, he was left alone with his thoughts. Massah understood what the angel of death had shown him. Every people had their time under the brassy gaze of heaven. He could forestall the doom of none. But he could change the price of life.
He dreamed again, of rivers of blood and rains of frogs and the stilled heartbeats of every firstborn son in the city. Walking in dreams, Massah made it so in the hot lands of the waking world, until the streets themselves cried as never he had for his mother’s death.
The angel wrote in a language possessing only one word, though that word was of infinite length. All the syllables of creation echoed in the letters it scratched across the weeping pages. They did not remain static as ink on vellum might, but writhed in their own private torments, recalling the souls rendered to make them so.
The Third Sleeping King
The Bridgebuilder was a man out of his place. He’d been raised by Attic tutors among marbled halls on a hilltop overlooking a glass-green sea. He’d learned the classics, he’d studied rhetorics and logic and law and the histories of empire. He’d answered questions and stood for examinations and dutifully learned the arts of sword, shield, spear, and horse. In short, the Bridgebuilder had been forged to be the sort of man needed in every corner of the empire.
Then the Senate had sent him to a land he’d never meant to visit, to rule over a people with no sense of their needs, only a burning, passionate purpose transcending all reason.
Out of place, even out of time, he sometimes thought. Certainly the Bridgebuilder lived in a palace, but it was so unlike the wind-whispered halls of his youth. His servants were for the most part sullen would-be poisoners kept in line only by the ever-present guards. The land itself rejected the empire, with short harvests and failing fisheries and blights on the olive groves and date palms, so even the most hard-hearted tax gatherer came back with chests half empty.
People who have nothing can pay nothing. It was a lesson these fools had taken to heart, until the Bridgebuilder began to wonder if they had fouled their own wells out of sheer, raw spite.
His only relief came in the light wine that was made up in the hills and shipped down to the lowlands in resinous casks. The flavor reminded him of the piney ferments the servants of his youth drank, which was fine with the Bridgebuilder. He had no pretensions to be anything other than a hopeless colonial, unworthy of the exacting standards of the Eternal City, whose empire he served. He would never sit in the Senate, or aspire to a voice at the emperor’s ear.
He just wished mightily that he was anywhere but this miserable post.
Even the nights were hot through most of the seasons. The Bridgebuilder would take his resinous wine and two or three of the serving girls and retire to his apartments on the roof of the palace. There he would command them to bathe him with sponges soaked in watered vinegar. After that he would command them to bathe one another. There was always room among his silks for an extra girl, and as the people of this place hated his virtues as much as they hated his vices, the Bridgebuilder indulged himself regardless.
One girl in particular he had favored for a handful of seasons—Saleh. She was willing to lie with him in whatever manner pleased him. On nights when he was too far gone in wine to know his own mind, she would lie with him in whatever manner pleased her. And she was never jealous of any favor he showed to other girls. Best of all, she would hold him when the weeping came upon him, and whisper him to sleep with counsels which felt wise in the watches of the night, whatever his morning wit might later make of them.
So it was that Saleh came to be his confidante in matters of state. Often as not, he wept for sheer frustration, once the wine had done its work. They curled together amid billowing curtains and the salt smell of the nearby ocean as she listened, and spoke, and listened.
“Is that priestly council your master?” she asked him one time during a particularly difficult bout of religious revivalism among the occupied peoples.
The Bridgebuilder waved off the suggestion. “No, no, I serve only the demands of empire. My orders come by courier aboard fast galleys, not from a bushel of black-robed schemers on their temple steps.”
“Of course,” Saleh said. She kissed his ears, nibbling on the edges as he loved so much. “So their words are as the barking of dogs to you, yes?”
“Yes,” he said, sighing. “I mean, no. No. I cannot simply order them to act. I do not have soldiers enough to dictate from every street corner.”
“So you are beholden to their goodwill.” Something glinted in her voice, an edge he had not often heard—or noticed—before.
“Never.” Pride stirred within him, a sluggish beast long put to sleep by the sheer unreasonableness of this place.
“You are the lion of this land,” Saleh told him. Her hand, oiled now, slipped down to once more seek proof of his manly worth. “Do not let them shave your mane.”
Later, lost in restless sleep, the Bridgebuilder was visited by two men from out of time. One had the seeming of a savage, freshly descended from some blood-soaked mountaintop. The other was a man of courtly bearing, wrapped in the grave-pale linens of Egypt long past.
—You deserve your name, the savage said.
—And the joy of your position, added his companion.
They spoke in a sort of chorus:
—Do not judge for the rabble. That is no better than choosing between two rotten fruits. When you are done, you still have only rotten fruit to show for your labors.
“Who are you?” he asked.
—Sleeping kings of old.
Not my kings, the Bridgebuilder thought, but he had too much respect for the power of the dream to speak thusly.
Soon after, he refused to hear a case. A man was set to die for some pointless heresy, and the Bridgebuilder could have freed him. “The choice of rotten fruits does not appeal to me,” he haughtily told the delegation of local priests. Saleh had smiled at him from the shadows, but he never saw her again.
In time, the Bridgebuilder realized that she, too, had been part of the dream; prophecy gone wrong without him ever knowing how to set it to rights.
The angel recorded as faithfully as only one of its kind could do. Mindless in their devotion, they were not made to question. That was the province of men and women, those failed echoes of the creator. Words twisted as much as they ever had, crossing the bridge of meaning between intent and actuality. Still, the page held them.
The Fourth Sleeping King
The maid buckled her armor. She was so very tired. The messenger angels did not come so much anymore. It had all been so clear in the years before she’d picked up a sword. Voices in the hayloft, visions of light by night. God spoke through His servants and she listened.
She was the maid. This was the way of things.
Now she was accounted an enemy even by the very people she’d saved. The invaders from across the water, of course, said terrible things of her. The maid knew to expect that. Scullery girls argued in the same fashion. In a way, it was an honor to have her name on the lips of enemy nobles. She was the only woman they did not ignore.
But her own countrymen had turned away from her as well. Their hate bloomed the red-gold colors of mounting flames as surely as the leaves turned away from summer when autumn stole across the forests. This she could not understand. Had she not pressed the fight at Orléans and Jargeau? Had she not saved the very life of the Duke of Alençon?
There was the truth, of course. To be saved by a woman was more disgraceful than to have been defeated by a man. Their ears were open to the charges whispered from across the water, spread in those places where the armies met and mingled on saints’ days, in whores’ beds, at market towns, around council tables.
God had not forsaken her, but her own people had.
Still, she wore these good greaves and chain over a surcoat. Still, she had the helmet dented by a dozen arrows, each turned away in the last moment by an angel’s hand, even while those closest to her fell. Still, she had this sword. The ultimate blasphemy, far beyond the worried mutterings of the priests—that a woman should take up the most male of weapons and prove herself able to cut and thrust her way into the body of the enemy soldiers and their army alike.
With that thought, she sat to oil and whet her blade. This had not been in the morning’s plan. Mist rose off the fields outside her tent, the smell of horses and campfires, the little sounds of an army waking to a battle day. Even the sound of footsteps echoing on stone was not enough to deter her from her task, though it reminded her that the rest of this was memory, or dream.
Stroke the blade. Metal gleamed in the oil, a false brilliance which dried all too soon, but for a while made this a sword of heaven. The whicking sound of the whetstone against the edge. The heft of the pommel, more familiar to her now than the hand of any of the lovers she’d never taken in her years among men. The rotten straw reek of the cell where she knew she slept, even as the dream-sword found its edge.
—There is no more to be done.
She stiffened, the sword falling away from her hand even though there was no clangor of the blade striking the ground. The stuff of dreams, as real as it had been. This was the first time the Lord’s host had spoken to her in… how long? “I am content,” the maid lied.
—No one is content facing their end.
“The end of my life on earth is but the beginning of my place in heaven,” she replied piously. Though in truth, she’d long doubted that as well. Too many of the men she’d killed were simply men. Not demons or devils, but ordinary persons with wives and children, who ate too much and farted and slept uneasily and cursed their serjeants and prayed upon their knees to the same God she did.
Could she truly climb to heaven on a stairway made of the corpses of men who’d died with the Lord’s name upon their lips?
—Yes. Of course the angel could hear her thoughts.
With that the maid once more knew this for a dream. The messenger spoke in the words of the enemy, which was not so different from her own Frankish speech, but always before they had whispered to her in the writhing tongue of angels, which is far more like the stirring of snakes in some nest, or the rising of a locust horde, than any simple words from the mouth of a woman or man.
Had the conversations always been dreams?
—Yes, the angel said again.—But what does it matter? The world is but a dream of God. You will be a king in the history of this dream.
“A king in death?” she asked aloud. “Surely a queen.”
—No simpering queen drew on armor and sword, the angel told her reproachfully.
Queens do not simper, the maid thought, and turned her face away until she tasted straw in her mouth and awoke to a bright morning with the memory of a sword’s heaviness on her lap. The gaze of the priest before her smoldered, and the maid knew she, too, would soon smolder.
The angel paused in its labors. Its kind were Divine intent, in the most literal sense, and so the purposes of the Tetragrammaton were never a mystery. Still, the words spreading from its pen introduced an unheralded glimmer of doubt.
Doubt was heresy, doubt was the casting out, a star fallen from the crystal heavens to the deepest lake of ice far beneath the middle world of God’s creation. Shrugging off the unaccustomed sense, the angel resumed its toils.
The Fifth Sleeping King
The old man sat amid the willow trees and stared out across the Potomac. The waters of the river ran muddy, almost oily, seeming tired as they slipped home toward the sea. He’d been many things. The cicadas in the trees hummed the story of his life.
Planter.
Surveyor.
Soldier.
Political.
General.
President.
“But never king,” he told the approaching night. In truth, surveyor had always been his favorite.
—Of course you were a king.
The old man looked up at the voice, which had carried over the cycling buzz of the insects. An angel stood before him—of this he had no doubt, for all his lifetime of tepid faith. Not recognizing this creature as one of God’s messengers would be like not recognizing the ocean as being made of water.
It stood before him, a composite of mist off the river and the singing of slaves and the smell of the smokehouse and a few swirling leaves caught up in the hem of its robe. The old man knew he was dreaming then, but knew also that this, alone among all the dreams of his lifetime, was more real than even his waking moments.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I went to some trouble never to be crowned.”
—Kingship is not a matter of a circlet upon the brow. There was something almost prim in the angel’s tone.
A question stole unbidden from his mouth. “Is my time at hand?” He was immediately ashamed of the fear that had asked it.
—I am not that messenger. Kindliness guttered in the angel’s eyes, warming coals for the cold hands of the old man’s soul.
He resolved to ask no more questions. That revelation should choose to come to him in the sunset of his days was no more, or less, surprising than any of the other things which had overtaken the old man down the now-vanished years. “I thank you for the visit, at least. Most who come to see me want something. Asking, always asking.”
—I ask nothing of you that you do not ask of yourself. The angel moved, drawing the wind with it as a cloak, so the waters of the Potomac stirred in a way that would have alarmed any waterman.
“I ask nothing of myself.” Children, thought the old man. Issue of his loins. A swift ending to the fractured mess the politics of his young nation had already become. A brake for the pride of those who had succeeded him in office both high and low. “Though sometimes I ask much of the world,” he admitted with the same ruthless self-honesty that had so often been a stumbling block in his life.
The angel bent before him. Kneeling?—Here is the secret of your life, it whispered in a voice of willow leaves and the whippoorwill. When it began to speak again, all the old man heard was the dank, close sound of darkness, and the fading of Martha’s crying. He stared at his trembling hands and wondered how long she would mourn him.
The pen scratched on. Scribing, scrying, painting futures in the ink of the past, though all time was one from the vantage of the angel’s copydesk. It had recovered its equilibrium. Angels were pendulums, marking the endless moments of the mind of God, messengers bridging the ineluctable gap between perfected intent and the imperfect matter of Creation.
It had never questioned why God, who was all things everywhere, should require a book to record His doings, or the doings of His creation. It is not the nature of angels to question, only to answer. It is not the nature of angels to devise, only to record.
The Sixth Sleeping King
What the hell was the matter with people? No respect, that was it. His mother had been right. No one ever listened to him like they should.
The man who had been commander in chief poured himself another drink. He wasn’t supposed to, had given it up years ago so far as anyone knew. The gap between what he said he did and what he actually did had ceased to matter so long ago that the ex–commander in chief rarely considered it anymore. What he said, what he believed, was the truth. The messy details were just that: messy details. No one’s business.
Disappointment, that was it. So many things which should have happened never did. Promises from Scripture and politics alike had been betrayed by niggling traitors. No one saw his goodness, his rectitude. Not even Laura, who’d always stood beside him, shrouding her thoughts in a smile.
He really ought to have married a girl like Mom. A man could rule the world with a woman like that at his side. Daddy had, damn him.
The ice in his glass clinked like the fall of coins. The outside sweated cold and heavy. He knew then he was dreaming, he really hadn’t touched a drink in years. Not really. Not that counted. The ex–commander in chief simply didn’t stand around mixing a highball.
He had people to do it for him.
Even in his dreams, a man had to laugh at himself.
A young fellow in a suit stepped close. Dark skinned, but not obviously any particular kind of colored. The ex–commander in chief didn’t recognize the guy, though he wore the regulation gray suit and translucent earpiece.—Sir. The fellow’s voice slipped through another layer of dreaming into a space of soaring naves and thundering sermons and the safe, blind glory of prayer.
“This is about the red heifer, isn’t it?” Where had that come from? He wasn’t supposed to talk about it. The glory would come, in his lifetime, he’d been promised. He knew.
—Sir. Something hung in the fellow’s eyes, expectant as a launch code.
He felt his breathing grow shallow and hard. “Is it time?” The promise, it was coming to pass!
—Sir.
A familiar peevishness rose inside him, that his handlers had so long fought to banish. Too bad for them, he was the boss here. Always would be. Didn’t matter how he got to the top, nope. He was here now and not climbing down. No sir. “What is it,” the ex–commander in chief demanded. “Speak up!”
—Sir. The voice sounded haunted, as if coming from an empty hallway far away.
He tried to shake off his dream, to wake up gasping amid the sheets. He hated the feeling of being wrapped in self-doubt, and always shed it as quickly as he could. Mother said too much thinking was bad for a man. The ex–commander in chief had learned to trust his gut. Facts changed depending on who brought them to you. Feelings were the hard truths.
Right now he was feeling very worried indeed.
—Sir. A terrible fire blossomed behind the fellow’s gaze. The ex–commander in chief threw his drink at the flames, but they only passed outward along the arcs of liquid and ice and shattered glass until his dream was consumed by fire and a great voice echoed from the heavens, asking him if this was truly what he intended.
Still, he did not doubt himself. Not him. Nope. No sir.
The angel finally set aside its pen. The book was done, or would be until it was opened again. Words were the oldest, greatest magic. God had spoken in the beginning, and He would someday unspeak the end, swallowing Creation down in a sweeping blur of undoing: oaks shrinking to acorns; cold cinders swelling first to red giants, then reduced to their starry births; old men climbing from graves to step backwards to life until they climb puling and mewing back to the salty delta from which each had first flowed.
As done, undone. As lived, unlived. Time, helical, alive, autophagic, endless as a circle, with as many corners as an egg.
All of this best stated in the language of dreams. Consciousness was too linear for even the angel itself to properly comprehend the sweeping swirl of God’s Creation. How so for His poor creatures of clay and sweat and breath?
It smiled, preening a moment, feeling a rare sense of accomplishment before moving on to the next task: to bear the book away so it might someday be read.
The Seventh King
She is just a girl. She doesn’t know her parents, though there are people who live in her house and clothe her and feed her and call her by a name not her own. At night a favorite uncle crawls out of the wainscoting, thin as a shadow, heavy as a star, and whispers to her the dreams of sleeping kings long dead.
Someday she will be so famous that they will have to write down her dreams. When she grows into her power and announces her true name, darkness will settle like a cloak, bringing the nighttime of the soul to all those who have plunged her into darkness.
Which is to say, all of everyone.
For now, dreaming is enough. There is no higher truth.
The Fall of the Moon
My grandfather Lake was a man whose presence in my life was as great as the moon’s pull over the tides. In a very indirect way, this tale is about me and him.
My grandfather Lake was a man whose presence in my life was as great as the moon’s pull over the tides. In a very indirect way, this tale is about me and him.
Hassan polished the twisted beech keel of his boat. The vessel had been a-building for years, assembled only from holy wood—thrown up by the raging Sea of Murmurs which even now coiled on the western horizon frothing like blood—and his grandfather’s bones. It was not a large boat, but Hassan was not a large man. All he intended was to ride the Tide of Spring.
His work of late had been mostly in waiting. His grandfather had passed as all men someday do, with a familiar smile on his old man’s face and a strange woman’s name on his young man’s lips. Hassan had carefully burned his grandfather’s flesh to send the soul spiraling toward the outer moons, then baked the flensed bones in an oven built from clay mixed with his own blood.
The old man had emerged grinning and polished, pale and harder than he had ever been in life.
Now those bones were fitted into the ribs of the beech-keeled boat. It cost a soul to sail upon the Sea of Murmurs, a sacrifice endlessly renewed upon the smoking waves. Hassan had whispered his grandfather’s name as he’d fitted each knuckle, each rib, each long bone, until the syllables had vanished from his mind with the final setting of the jaw in the tiller lock.
His grandfather had become the boat. A soul to sail on the sea, while Hassan remained a breathing man with his eyes open six feet above the welcoming soil.
“I will live forever,” Hassan told his grandfather.
The boat said nothing, though Hassan thought he could hear it breathing.
“You listen, boy. You’ve ears to hear.” The old man’s hand was a crab’s claw, twisted fingers bent together to grab young elbows in pain. “There’s more to this world, and more, even as God wills us to be here.”
Hassan smiled. “Drink your tea, Grandfather.” He passed a little clay tumbler over to a shivering hand. They lived in a small hut hard by a cypress, as far from Telos as anyone did.
Alone together, thinking thoughts, the two of them.
“Tea.” His grandfather grimaced. “This isn’t real tea. More like seaweed soup. Tea grows in little sacks on bushes tended by coolies on the sides of steep mountains.”
“What are coolies?”
After a long pause, his grandfather puffed out a ragged breath. “I don’t know, boy. I don’t know either.”
Obsidian cliffs towered behind the village of Telos, a wall sheer and hard enough to daunt even the most adventurous boys. Each day their dark glass reflected the setting sun in a multiplicity of dim fetches, a small, stubborn galaxy brought down close to the land for casual inspection. They made a mirrored hell of the Little Moons and the Great Moons on nights when the entire sky danced.
If a boy risked all to tramp across the sands at low tide, he could turn back and see the carved tops of the cliffs. There was a city there, a thousand thousand times greater than Telos had ever dreamed of being with its three waterfalls and single corral.
The contrast between the glittering ramparts high above and the little driftwood homes below could strain even the most stoic heart. Very few ever chanced the damp sand and the red-boiled wrath of the waves for a glimpse.
Otherwise the village and lives of its people unfolded in the strip of hay meadows and salt marshes and twisted cypress trees that stood as stubborn as life between the glassy cliffs and the burning sea. It was a world that reminded folk of their place with each ragged breath and staggering step.
Only Hassan’s grandfather had been different, and through him, Hassan.
The night Hassan’s grandfather died, Etienne the hetman burned the village library. Hassan stood in the flickering light of blazing paper, watching sparks arc from the useless, melting datacubes.
“It does us no good,” the hetman told Hassan. The village leader was an older man, blocky and stolid, uncle to Hassan’s late mother, and had always claimed a soft spot toward Hassan.
“It’s what we know,” Hassan muttered.
“No.” Etienne’s voice was a quiet, intense reflection of his grandfather’s. Like a version of the old man kept in a bottle. “We know the tides, and when the sea burns and stings, and to avoid the splinters of the cliffs. We know how the rains come and when they stay away. We know when to plant the maize and when to walk the fields plucking the borers from the stalks. That’s what we know. Not the names of kings and admirals and who discovered each of the metals.”
Hassan stared into the spitting fire. “He always said we were lost.”
“Maybe. But here is where we are found. Here is where we will stay.”
“Here.” The obsidian cliffs gleamed in the night as Hassan raised his eyes to the empty stars.
“It’s a good life,” said Etienne.
The hetman had missed one book. When Hassan went to fold his grandfather’s bedroll for the last time—Martine needed it for her middle son—he found the ragged volume beneath. It had a spine of split bamboo, that had been bound and rebound many times.
His grandfather had taught Hassan much about what few books they had. But Hassan had never seen this one.
He turned his find over in his hand. The cover was stretched leather, perhaps an eelskin, though he couldn’t be sure as it was worn with long handling. When he opened the book, the pages crackled.
Whatever the original creators had meant to say had been long lost to the scribings of dozens of others. Writing crabbed across the pages, up, down, sideways, on a slant, in the colors of different inks and the soft gray of clay and the dark red of blood.
Voices from the past.
He even recognized his grandfather’s hand.
Hassan sat down to read.
“Boy,” it said in the old man’s shaky block printing. Hassan had never been able to master writing himself. “First, you’ll need my bones.”
Once there had been boats which sailed the seas, both the mercurial Sea of Murmurs and the seas of ordinary water that stretched on all the worlds dreaming in the harsh light of the evening stars. Once there were boats which sailed the air, some fast as forked lightning that split the night, others slow as thought. Once there were boats which rode the tides of light that bound the stars together.
Now there were no boats at all.
The book told stories under stories. With practice, Hassan could pick out each hand. As he prepared his grandfather’s bones, then searched the beach for the right wood, he would take moments and read the different stories. The hand which had written rounded letters in blood could be picked out of the confusion of the pages just as Maryam’s drum could be heard beneath the singing of the village on Round Moon Festival.
Each story was a voice. The book was a chorus. Hassan knew that he would be the last.
The book told him many secrets:
“We are bound here between life and death. The black city on the cliffs behind us is our past. The deadly sea before us is our fate.”
“You will need to spend a soul to cross the fiery waters. Do not trade your own.”
“Our life was never meant to be this way. I cannot believe that either God or any man intended such for us.”
“Love while you can, live as you must.”
“I will be free beyond the horizon.”
“Beechwood thrown up by the sea will make a suitable keel. Cypress smokes until the oil bursts into flame.”
“This is the way to build a boat: attend to the pictures of my poor hand.”
“Sail away.”
“Live forever.”
“Sail away.”
Etienne came to Hassan in the month after his grandfather’s death.
“The old man needs to be within the soil,” the hetman said.
“He goes there piece by piece,” Hassan whispered. It had been among the first lessons of the book, marked with some urgency.
You will need to spend a soul.
“There is talk in the village.”
“There is always talk in the village. I do my duty.”
Etienne grabbed Hassan’s shoulder, squeezed it, a sort of distancing hug. “You are not healthy out here. Move into the town. Woo Maryam. She sees you as being… of interest.”
I will be free beyond the horizon.
“No. I bury him in pieces, in all the places he loved.” Such a lie; Grandfather had loved nothing but books. “He returns to soil.”
“You are as strange as he.”
Hassan had no answer for that.
A few weeks after Hassan found the beechwood for the keel, the Sea of Murmurs ran with mice and rats. The surf came rolling in oily sheets, tumbling the screaming animals to the sand. All of Telos scrambled along the beaches with nets and pots to harvest such a bounty of meat and pelts. In the normal course of life the village had only goats and a few surly chickens too precious to eat and too troublesome to roust out of the papaya trees.
This was a feast, one of the sea’s rare gifts among its endless curses.
The bounty ended suddenly in a wave of larger things with teeth like needles and a dozen scampering feet. These creatures slaughtered the survivors of the rodent tide, then had to be driven back into the sea with sticks and shouts and some injuries.
Still they feasted, though many limped and Majid the Younger lost three toes and a piece of one calf.
“Boy,” his grandfather said. “Wake up.”
Hassan blinked. Had he been sleeping?
The old man was young, younger than Hassan had ever known him, his fingers strong and supple as he shook Hassan’s shoulders. “There’s a Tide of Spring coming. After that, fires and the fall of the moon. Be ready, boy.”
“I’m ready,” Hassan said, but he spoke only to the empty hut. He went out to work on the boat by moonlight.
The book had this to say, in a reeling purple hand which spoke but rarely throughout the threaded pages:
“A moon will fall in time, as it has before. The black city was broken by a bright fist from above. The red sea was poisoned by a dark fist from beneath. All life changes.”
All life changes.
The night after his grandfather came to him, Hassan carved those words in his chest with a bone needle and some fire ash, then cried for the old man for the first time until the pain and blood-slicked sweat sent him into fever dreams of green fields of tea and giant brass coolies with the slack faces of apes, the wicked eyes of goats, and the tears of a lonely young man.
Etienne’s visits became fairly regular, usually while Hassan was polishing his grandfather’s bones or fitting pieces of bone and wood into the boat.
“Maryam will soon wed Majid the Younger,” the hetman said one day. “They have trod the corn together, and he has already captured a gull for the feast.”
“Don’t like gull meat.” Hassan tried to grin at Etienne. When had he last seen Maryam? “Stringy and sour.”
“You likewise.” Etienne patted the boat’s gunnel. “I know what this is.”
“It’s a boat.”
They both glanced toward the Sea of Murmurs. The water was a violent blue today, silver-finned mermaids singing sweetly perhaps half a kilometer offshore. Deadly.
“Such… craft and dedication… would serve Telos well. You could build a new council house. With your name upon the door for generations to read.”
I will live forever.
But Hassan said nothing.
After a while Etienne deposited a sack of papayas, squeezed Hassan’s shoulder, and departed.
One day the boat was done. Hassan simply knew that. He measured its length in three paces, its breadth in one, sighted down the oars carved so painstakingly in accordance with the rare picture drawn in a stained brown hand in the last book. Then he covered it over with a woven mat, walked into Telos, and began to survey the ground for a new council house.
It was something to do while waiting for the Tide of Spring.
Etienne misunderstood.
“So you are finally done with the old man,” the hetman said. “Perhaps you would sup with my family tonight? Crazy cousin Hassan is come to town, my daughters are saying.”
Love while you can, live as you must.
“I will see the children,” Hassan said quietly. He was surprised to find his voice creaking so.
Something like a shadow flitted across Etienne’s face. “They have not been children for a while.”
One evening as Hassan worked at carving out the notch in a cross-beam just so, he realized that the world felt different. Wrong.
It was the light.
He looked up.
The Round Moon was just bellying over the obsidian cliffs to the east. First and Third Little Moons danced in the mid-sky as always. But al-Maghrib, the Soulful Moon of Paradise, was too large, too low.
“The Fall of the Moon,” he whispered.
Hassan dropped his tools and sprinted from town. He had to get to his boat. Behind him people shouted, cried out, called to one another. Even as he left their words behind, Hassan could hear it was him they spoke of, not the Soulful Moon.
It did not matter. He would ride the Sea of Murmurs beyond the horizon and live forever.
Dragging his boat down the sand was back-breaking work. Small as it was, the craft was heavy. His grandfather’s soul seemed to serve as an anchor, a tether. Had Hassan misunderstood it all?
“You are too late for doubts,” he told himself.
The Sea of Murmurs rumbled behind him. It sounded almost gravelly, running thick tonight.
“I follow your secrets, Grandfather.”
“Hassan.”
He looked up. It was Etienne, looking much like his grandfather by some trick of the moon’s light. The hetman had half a dozen others with him, including two of his daughters.
“Leave it off, Hassan. Come home.”
“I must take my boat down to the sea.”
“No. There is work to be done. None of us have much, so each of us is precious. Leave off your grief.”
“It’s hope, not grief!” Hassan shouted.
When they came for him, he laid to with the oar until he broke ribs on one of his girl-cousins.
As she screamed, Etienne waved the others off. “Please, Hassan. Come home.”
“No.” Secrets spilled from his lips like rain from a careless cloud. “This is the Fall of the Moon, and the Tide of Spring. I must away before the world ends. I must be free.”
“Come home and be free.”
Hassan threw the oar back into the boat and returned to his dragging. After a moment, Etienne leaned into the stern and pushed. “Come on,” the hetman shouted, “the sooner he sinks his silly boat, the sooner we all go home.”
But the growing light of the Soulful Moon gave lie to the words and hope to Hassan’s heart.
I will be free beyond the horizon.
The Sea of Murmurs ran with sand and soil, a foam of wiggling worms atop the heaving brown tide. Was this the Tide of Spring? Hassan couldn’t imagine how the boat could navigate such a muddy, almost-solid expanse.
Most of Telos had come down to the beach to watch the madman and his boat. Some cried, casting him hot looks, especially those tending his injured girl-cousin. Others stared at the blazing moon. Wind drove along the sand, carrying soil from the sea and an unexpected heat.
Hassan could believe this to be the end of the world.
“Look!” someone shouted.
There was color in the sea. Flashes here and there, like fire sparks on a distant stretch of beach.
The Tide of Spring?
Then all the muddy water burst into bloom, a thousand million billion flowers exploding on the Sea of Murmurs in a riot of color and scent. Hassan grabbed the bow of his boat and ran. It was light as a palm leaf, floating across the sand behind him. When he glanced back, he saw many hands helping.
His feet met the sea on the first spray of petals from the incoming tide. Hassan ran until the flowers were up to his knees. There was still water down below, a thick syrupy nectar, but even below the surface it was filled with the soft nudging of blooms. The boat slid in among the raging color as if made for the task, and Hassan tumbled into it. He would cross the horizon. He would live forever.
“Who will you take with you?” asked Etienne, waist-deep in flowers, his face glowing sad and hard by the blazing light of the Soulful Moon.
“Grandfather,” Hassan answered. He sat down on the single bench, nodded to the gleaming bones worked in among the planks of the boat, and bent to his oars. Each stroke broke the surface of the Sea of Murmurs with a spray of perfumed scent that shivered his spine.
Behind him, they cried on the beach as the Soulful Moon fell. When he looked over his shoulder, Hassan saw that lights winked on one by one in the black cities atop the obsidian cliffs.
Then Hassan turned his face to horizon, and freedom, even as the moon fell and the air burned and flowers carried him in his grandfather’s arms to someplace he never could have known before.
A Critical Examination of Stigmata’s Print Taking the Rats to Riga
Jeff and Ann VanderMeer asked me to write a story for them. I did. They hated it, telling me the story did everything they wanted, but in a way that did not work for them. So I wrote this story instead. See how many genre writers you can spot in here somewhere.
Jeff and Ann VanderMeer asked me to write a story for them. I did. They hated it, telling me the story did everything they wanted, but in a way that did not work for them. So I wrote this story instead. See how many genre writers you can spot in here somewhere.
Perhaps the most quotidian detail of the print Taking the Rats to Riga (1969) is the eponymous rats themselves. This is somewhat uncharacteristic of the work of the artist Stigmata (b. Crispus Chang-Evans, Nanking, China, 1942; d. Khyber Pass, Pakistan, 1992). The artist was notorious for eschewing both representation and naturalism, noting in a 1967 interview with Andy Warhol, “The dial ain’t set on sketch, and I’ll never be a d**ned camera” (artINterCHANGE; vol. III, no. 4; 1968).
The unusual inclusion of such readily identifiable elements strongly hints that Rats is based on an actual event. The precise nature of this event is obscured by our distance in time from the origins of this print, as well as Stigmata’s notoriously poor record-keeping. Lambshead’s own acquisition notes on the print are strangely sparse as well. Art-world rumor whispers that the print depicts a scene from Karneval der Naviscaputer, an occasional festival of deviant performance art held within East Berlin’s underground club culture during the mid- to late 1960s.
The astute observer would do well to attempt deconstruction of some of the other elements in Rats. Art unexamined is, after all, art unexperienced. In this case, even a close examination is unlikely to reveal the mundane truths behind the print. The emotive truths are, however, most certainly available.
Consider the chain that the rats are climbing. Why do they ascend? From where have they come? A hook dangles or swings not far below the lower rat. It appears ornamented in both shape and detail. Bejeweled, this cannot be an artifact of the working man. Nor does it conform to the Continental notion of kunstbrukt, that design should be both beautiful and functional. This hook is curious and attractive, but hardly something to lift a bale of opium from the decks of a shabby Ceylonese trawler. One must also consider the possibility hinted at in the print’s title, that these are the plague rats Renfield carries into the world for his master Dracula, as depicted repeatedly in cinema.
Examine the chain itself. In Stigmata’s rendering, this could just as easily be a motorcycle chain as a cargo chain or an anchor chain. Were that to be the case, we might assume the rats were being drawn upward, toward the top verge of the image. The dynamism of their forms suggests that they are more than mere passengers. Still, is that no different from a man walking up an escalator?
Once we have evaluated the context in which the rats appear, the image begins to lose its coherence. Most observers consider the smaller lines in the background to be more distant chains of the same sort the rats are climbing, but Priest has advanced the argument that those may be strings of light bulbs (Struggles in European Aesthetics, Eden Moore Press, London, 1978). Her assertion is undercut by the strong front lighting on the primary figures in the composition, but given Stigmata’s well-documented disregard for artistic convention, this is an inherently irresolvable issue.
The most visually dominant element in Rats is the tentacled skeleton in the left side of the image. Sarcastically dubbed “The Devil Dog” in a critical essay by Robyn (Contemporary Images, Malachite Books, Ann Arbor, 1975), this name has stuck, and is sometimes misattributed as Stigmata’s title for the work. In stark contrast with the climbing rats, there is nothing natural or realistic about the Devil Dog. Rather, it combines elements of fictional nightmare ranging from Lovecraft’s imaginary Cthulhu mythos to the classic satanic imagery of Christian art.
Priest (op. cit.) nevertheless suggests that the Devil Dog may, in fact, be representational. Presuming even a grain of truth, this theory could represent the source of Lambshead’s interest in acquiring Rats for his collection, given the doctor’s well-known dedication to his own extensive wunderkammer. It is difficult for the observer to seriously credit Priest’s notion, however, as she advances no reasonable theory as to what creature or artifact the Devil Dog could represent. She simply uses scare words such as “mutant” and “chimera” without substantiation. The burden of proof for such an outlandish assertion lies very strongly with the theorist, not with her critics.
Robyn and other observers have offered the far simpler hypothesis that the Devil Dog is an expression of Stigmata’s own deeper fears. The open jaw seems almost to have been caught in the act of speech. While the eyes are vacant, the detail along the center line of the skull and above the orbitals can be interpreted as flames rather than horns or spurs. For a deep analysis of this interpretation, see Abraham (Oops, I Ate the Rainbow: Challenges of Visual Metaphor, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1986). The tentacles dangle, horrifying yet not precisely threatening to either the artist or the observer. Rising above and behind is an empty rib cage—heartless, gutless, a body devoid of those things that make us real. This is a monster that shames but does not shamble, that bites but does not shit, that writhes but does not grasp.
The most important element in Rats is, without a doubt, the hand rising up to brush at the Devil Dog’s prominent, stabbing beak. It is undeniably primate, and equally so undeniably inhuman. Still, a strong critical consensus prevails that this is Stigmata’s own hand intruding to touch the engine of his fear. While the rats seek to escape up their chain, this long-fingered ape reaches deeper into the illuminated shadows, touching the locus of terror without quite grasping it. The parallels to Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam (ca. 1511) are inescapable and disturbing. Who is creating whom here? Is Stigmata being brought to life by his own fears? Or does he birth them into this print, as so many artists do, to release his creation on an unsuspecting world?
We can never answer those questions for Stigmata. Reticent in life, he, like all who have gone before, is thoroughly silent in death. Each of us can answer those questions for ourselves, however, seeing deeper into this print than the casual horror and blatant surrealism to what lies beneath. Much as Lambshead must have done when he bought the piece from the court-appointed master liquidating Stigmata’s troubled estate, via telephone auction in 1993.
What wonder lies in yonder cabinet? Taking the Rats to Riga is a door to open the eyes of the mind. Like all worthwhile art, the piece invites us on a journey that has no path nor map, nor even an endpoint. Only a process, footsteps through the mind of an artist now forever lost to us.
From the Countries of Her Dreams
WITH SHANNON PAGE
This is a story set in the world of Green and her misadventures. It introduces some characters who become important in my novel Kalimpura. Plus it shows a bit more of the theogeny of this place, which always seemed important to me.
This is a story set in the world of Green and her misadventures. It introduces some characters who become important in my novel Kalimpura. Plus it shows a bit more of the theogeny of this place, which always seemed important to me.
Laris, of late priestess of the goddess Marya, now priestess of Mother Iron, awoke with a sweating, fearful trembling. Solis had been at her side once more, though Laris had laid her sister into the ground two months past. Winter gnawed at her little whore’s apartment over the tack shop in Set Ring Alley. Even with rags stuffed around the shutters the wind found her, while the tapping of the smiths and farriers down below set a rhythm to her days of sleep.
Prostitutes worked nights. Priestesses never stopped working. It was all she could do to rest in daylight. And here came Solis again. Not a true ghost, nor a sending, Laris was certain, though later she would sacrifice a cup of grain spirits and a silver nail to Mother Iron to be certain.
No, these visits of her dead sister were from the countries of her own dreams, not the realms of spirit.
Even worse, she thought she knew why.
Sleep was gone now, vanquished by the biting chill that cut through her blankets, and the light leaking past the rags and shutters. Winter in Copper Downs was not for the faint of heart nor the flat of purse. Laris reached down by her feet and found her thick woolen gown—skirt buttoned up the front and back for easy access—and slid the garment over her cotton undershift without first turning down her covers. Then she slipped from her bed, kneeling before her tiny iron stove to build a small fire of scavenged scrapwood in hopes of warming both her hands and a bit of washing water. Lucifer matches were a rare luxury in her life.
Laris sighed. Being priestess of a goddess whose worshippers were by definition destitute and desperate left a great deal to be desired insofar as the offertory went. As further insult, their women’s temple was a jumbled pile of bricks that had taken Solis’s life when those saffron-robed bastards had come goddess-killing.
“Enough,” she whispered, her breath fogging in bright ribbons from her mouth. She could think in circles for hours without finding a better answer. Instead she concentrated on coaxing the little flames to life within their ironwork. Breaking the skin of ice from the top of her water jar. Dipping a small cup’s worth into the tarnished copper pot. All of this, step by step, without thinking of her sister or the death of the goddess Marya or the whirling bricks of the temple as they flew like flower petals before a storm raised on the ancient hatred of men and their gods.
“Outside,” Laris gasped. Wondering if she was being driven mad by her sister’s death and the savaging of winter, she stumbled from her little room and down the narrow stairs to seek food.
The lazaret on Bustle Street was the only place in Copper Downs where a woman could seek medical help without inconvenient questions being asked, or permission being required of a husband, father, or brother. The thick-walled, anonymous building served other purposes as well. One of them, quite simply, was a large pot of soup that never seemed to boil dry, but mutated in season from fish stock to stewed pigeon to a vegetable slurry and on and on. A woman could always get a bowl. Though it might taste strange, and sometimes sat poorly on the gut, the soup was ever warm and filling.
Besides, Laris needed to talk to someone. Neela, the old woman who ceaselessly tended the pot, was a good listener. The priestess took a turn behind the short, splintered counter, filling bowls while Neela chopped something stringy and gelid, occasionally tossing slivers into the great iron kettle.
Patients and their nurses shuffled by, as did one or another woman off the street. “The blessings of Mother Iron on you,” Laris muttered with each bowl. Marya had been the women’s goddess here in Copper Downs, all Laris’s life and for generations before hers, but those days were gone. Desire, titanic goddess from the beginning of all things and mother to all the daughter-goddesses of women, had raised Mother Iron in the place of lost Marya, and so Laris served the new goddess, strange as she was.
Some of the women made Marya’s hand sign—whether old habit or protest, Laris could not say. Others popped their thumb upward from a lax fist, the nail symbol of Mother Iron herself. Still more made no response at all. All of them took their soup, though, which Laris took to say more about the needs of women than any amount of prayer or sacrifice might do.
“You never comes without a reason,” Neela said behind her, startling Laris. “You eats, as they all does from time to time, but you only comes this side of the counter when you needs.”
“Like praying, I suppose,” Laris replied, recovering her wits. Had she been drifting off?
Neela huffed. “I wouldn’t be the priestess with the knowing of prayers.”
“Blessings on you, as well.” The line had faded away, so it was only the two women, a stack of scuffed pottery bowls, and the big pot bubbling quietly to itself while the smells of the dock seemed to play in the steam.
“Huh. You always was fresh.” The knife, honed so thin it would surely shatter into flakes soon, slammed into the block. “So was your sister.”
Thusly, Neela cut to the heart of things. “I dream of her,” Laris blurted.
“Aye, and who doesn’t dream of their dead?” Sympathy stained the old woman’s voice, though her expression was curdled as ever.
“She comes, she begs.”
“And you gives, yes?”
“No.” Laris turned a bowl in her hand, seeing it with her fingers rather than her eyes. Glaze rough in some places, worn smooth in others so that the soapy texture of the clay met her touch. Heavy but unbalanced, much like life itself. Chipped at the rim. “I cannot give what she wants.”
“That boy, ain’t it.” The words were not a question, coming from Neela.
“That boy,” said Laris miserably. She’d bedded hundreds of men for coin, loved a few of them for spite, but the hearts of women always drew her closer. Solis had been of a more generous spirit and traditional tastes. She’d had an understanding with Radko, a grocer’s boy—though years past the age when that term was anything but a job title—with a simple outlook on life and a seemingly endless supply of fresh vegetables.
Laris had never been able to stand Radko. She’d tolerated him for the sake of the food he brought when he came courting, and the happiness Solis seemed to find in him.
“Ain’t you talking to him since herself was kilt?”
Two months, thought Laris. “I didn’t let him come to the funeral. That was women’s business.” I have not spoken to Radko in the two months since Solis was killed.
“Course she’s crying.” Neela was matter-of-fact. “She ain’t said good-bye to him she loves.” The paper-thin knife came close, not a threat, just a pointer at the flaw in Laris’s own heart. “On account of you ain’t let her.”
As always with Neela, she only repeated the things you’d already told her. Truth from another’s mouth was so much more damning than the doubtful thoughts that chased themselves through Laris’s quiet moments. “Thank you,” she said.
“Go thank yourself,” groused the older woman. She handed a long wooden ladle to Laris. “And stir a while. I must take me to the small room.”
She didn’t seek out Radko that day. Knowing and doing were not the same thing. Her years before the altar had taught her much about the difference.
Instead Laris spent her afternoon tending the temporary fane of Mother Iron, in a Temple Quarter alley behind the temple of the Frog God. They still had rights to the lot where the old temple of Marya had stood, but no money or labor to clear away the wreckage, let alone rebuild. The Frog God priests had taken pity on the women—their concerns stood outside the politics of daughter-goddesses—and allowed Mother Iron’s followers the relative shelter of their midden area.
One could make much combing the trash of wealthier people, but mostly Laris was glad for a stout wall with a small chimney that almost always blasted warm, smoky air. A light framework of scavenged timber, topped with ragged strips of sailcloth sewn together, made up the sanctuary. The altar was little more than a clump of still-joined bricks lugged from the nearby ruins, topped with an increasing pile of rusty iron nails.
No one had yet vandalized it. Women came by in the cold afternoon in ones and twos—mothers and daughters and maids and maidens and cooks and prostitutes and an actress off a foreign ship and a banker’s wife and one woman cloaked so tight Laris had no sense of her, except that she walked wrapped in that strange insulation that money creates about the very wealthy.
Each brought their mite or measure. Each prayed for guidance, or protection, or just sobbed a while. Laris listened to those who would speak, and comforted those who would take the circle of her arms around them, and shivered in the cold between times. She never counted the offerings, not until it was time for her to pack away what could be packed and seek her own living in the taverns by night.
Food in the form of withered apples, a strip of dried fish, and several stale rolls—enough for her to eat the next two days. Also three copper taels, half a dozen iron nails, and improbably, one silver obol. Laris was certain that last had not come with the wealthy woman, and probably not the banker’s wife. People with money always understood just how little was needed to get what they wanted from people without.
Laris set the coins in an inner pouch for the strongbox back at the lazaret where Mother Iron’s meager funds were kept against the future. The rest she put in a roughspun bag before heading for her usual evening haunt.
Winter crimped the flesh trade as surely as it crimped shipping or any other pursuit that required men to bestir themselves out of doors. Also, working without her sister seemed to make Laris less desirable, less interesting, except to those so drunk or bemused that any woman with a damp sweetpocket was good enough. Unless she was starving, she never went with such men. Half of them turned violent, the rest cried for their mothers and would not leave her bed when their time was up.
She sat at the shadowed end of the bar in the Poison Fish and sipped from a tumbler of watered wine. Undine behind the bar had given it to Laris on credit, but when she turned a man, Laris knew the drink and the cost of an upstairs room would leave her with little more than she had now.
The bowl of mashed chickpeas had been pure kindness.
Then Radko came stumbling from the frozen street. A voice murmured in her ear, and for a shocked moment, Laris thought Solis was still beside her. “What, sib?” she whispered in return, unsure if she was more afraid of an answer or the lack of one.
He brushed fresh snow off his tan corduroy coat, then slipped out of it, hanging it on one of the hooks alongside the door. The man didn’t even look toward her—Laris was relieved that he hadn’t pursued her into the Poison Fish with a purpose, at least—as he placed his hat, gloves, scarf, and face mask in the pockets of the shapeless jacket, leaving his upper body clad only in woolen undershirt, long-sleeved work shirt, and stained sheepskin vest.
When Radko stepped to the other end of the bar, under the hissing lantern Undine hung there to better see each new customer, Laris got a good view of his profile. Slightly hunched at the shoulder, as if he were half a lifetime older. Long, narrow nose out of alignment thanks to some argument with a teamster years past, if she recalled the story correctly. Curly hair greasy-dark with the sweat of labor, that he washed in the spring and again in the fall each year. Thick eyebrows under a deep forehead that hid eyes she knew would glimmer a dull brown.
Dull brown, that was the man. She’d never known what Solis had seen in him.
Still, her late sister’s hand on her elbow propelled Laris into the light, struggling against the few steps toward that end of the bar.
“Oh, hullo,” Radko said, looking up at her.
Exasperation outpaced caution to Laris’s lips. “Hullo? That’s all you have for me now, two months after she died?”
He shrugged, accepted a pewter tankard of ale from Undine. Laris smelled the yeasty, liquid-bread stink of it. Radko traced a finger through the foam. “You don’t never talk to me, ma’am.” A shrug. “She died, you didn’t want me around. Didn’t matter what I had for you.”
Laris felt a pang of guilt, followed by another burst of anger. Her heart was too troubled for this conversation. But Neela had held the right of it on her sharp tongue as well. “I was wrong,” she said slowly. The words were ashen in her mouth. “You grieved her, too, and I was wrong to turn you away.”
Another shrug. “Ever’body turns me away. ’M used to it.” A long pull on the tankard. Radko seemed to find something fascinating floating in his ale.
“Sh-she needs to say farewell,” Laris blurted.
That drew a long look from Radko, with an expression that implied there might yet be a measure of shrewdness behind those dull eyes. Finally: “Solis needs that, or you?”
You cut me, and I bleed. Laris tried to think like a priestess, though she was tired and cold and broke. “All of us need that, perhaps.”
Radko returned to studying his ale. His right index finger made nonsense patterns in the spill glistening on the worn oak bartop. “I’ll go with you,” he muttered.
“I… I haven’t worked yet tonight.” Somehow, her lack of clients suddenly seemed a deeply personal failing. Laris knew her beauty was fading with age and hard use, but there was always more to it than that. “I c-cannot leave.”
The man reached into the inner pocket of his sheepskin vest. “You’re four coppers, same as Solis, right?”
Laris just stared.
“For a flatback and half a candle’s worth of time,” Radko added, in case she had somehow not understood.
“Yes, but I—”
“I ain’t going with you,” he snarled. Now they were both embarrassed. “Just buying your time. So’s we can say farewell to Solis together.” Five coppers clinked onto the bar.
Well, thought Laris, at the least I won’t have to pay Undine for the room. Against her better judgment, she reached shivering for the coins. She left one behind for the barback to take in payment for her abandoned wine, thin as winter blood and almost as cold.
They pushed through the night, walking into the chill, whistling wind. The snow had left off again, but the sky bellied low and full, where it could be seen at all in the darkness. Only the greater streets of Copper Downs were lit by the new gas lamps. On a winter’s evening like this one, even the third watch was late enough for most houses to be shuttered. The light posts on the city’s lesser streets were glowing cinders, or empty, their pitch-soaked torches stolen for someone’s night fire.
From the Poison Fish to Laris’s apartment was only a matter of fifteen minutes or so in good weather. Tonight, head down, her thin cotton cloak drawn close, she figured on twenty. In this weather the idea of taking Radko into her bed, just for the warmth of it, had a certain appeal. But this was Radko. Her sister’s pet simpleton. She didn’t even want to touch his arm as they walked.
They couldn’t go to the new fane. The ruins of the old temple, where Solis had died, would be unbearable. Only in her room would it make sense to try to bid her sister farewell. Besides, that was where Laris saw Solis in her dreams.
Something caught at Solis so that she stumbled. A belated moment after, she realized it was Radko, tugging at her elbow. “You got a bully boy?” he asked, almost shouting over the wind to be heard.
“What?”
Radko jerked his chin back over his shoulder. Laris turned to look. Not a bully boy. Bully boys. Two of them, tall and walking swiftly. One was wide as a wall, the other almost too thin, and dark-skinned besides. One of those Selistani immigrants that the damned girl Green had drawn into the city.
Their singleness of purpose bespoke an immigrant-native comity that would be the pride of many a street-corner demagogue. Unfortunately, she appeared to be their single purpose.
“Not mine,” Laris shouted, and turned to run.
Radko grabbed her elbow again, and pulled her close. She fought this betrayal, thrusting her knee into his groin. The only thing that saved him from collapsing in a groaning heap was the leather-and-canvas work pants, padded for outdoor days in the cold.
“Kiss me,” he said, his voice thin. “Pretend, at least.”
Again, she was a moment behind. What was with her head? A woman alone didn’t survive long on the streets of Copper Downs by being slow. Step into a doorway, step out of their way. If the bully boys were bound elsewhere, let them pass unwitnessed.
She couldn’t outrun them anyway.
Nuzzling close to Radko, Laris thought about her sister kissing this man. Touching him. Lying with him. Taking him into her body. Solis had always preferred to be taken as a boy, if there was a bit of grease to be had. Laris detested the way she felt after such sex, as if air had been forced through the entire length of her digestion.
But he had done this thing. To Solis. Did he want to do it to her?
Surprised, she found herself kissing him. Ale, and a bit of salt, and the frosty edge of night. He’d eaten fish for dinner, with some southern spice.
And this simple man smelled very complicated, when she got so close.
Rough hands ripped her from his grasp. Laris spun, praying now to Mother Iron—a goddess whose greatest virtue was perhaps that she walked the streets of Copper Downs in bodily form, at least on some occasions.
Hear the plea of all women, that the fist of men shall not strike me down.
Strength flared within Laris, where most people might have quailed. She’d taken more than one beating in her life for refusing to cringe.
The wide one had her in his vast paw. He didn’t even look at Radko, who had slipped into the shadows. Fool! How could she have thought…? Whatever she’d been thinking, for a moment. The thinner one leaned close, eyes gleaming with the sparkle of whitecrust, that was sold six copper taels a twist, enough to keep a man on the far side of the edge through two sunrises.
“I got a wo-wo-word for yoo-yoo-you.” His accent was from across the Storm Sea, but something else twisted his voice, drawing the speech out like sugar candy on the vendor’s metal fork.
The big one snorted. “Raji’s been a little deep into the fairy dust,” he said, as conversational as a man comparing potatoes in the market. “But it’s his show.” Fingers tightened until the joints in her shoulder cracked. Laris shivered, and would have dropped to her knees if he were not simply holding her up.
How strong was he? Where in all the Smagadine hells was Radko?
“Wo-wo-wo…” The skinny one had become terminally tangled in thought.
That was when Radko struck. The fool. He grabbed for the whitecrust addict, who slipped away like fire in a frying pan, then snatched at Radko so fast Laris didn’t see him move.
Radko went down with three fingers tearing at his ear, a knife clattering to the frosted cobbles at their feet. The big one released Laris to hold back his companion. She scooped up the knife and pressed it hard, with both hands, into the big man’s jaw from behind and below, at the base of his tongue.
The smell of hot metal filled her, and for a moment Laris knew the touch of Mother Iron.
He screamed, gargled and strange-sounding, then turned back to her with death in his eyes. She lost the knife in the movement, but it stuck out of the big man’s head like a handle, so Laris danced away from him, grabbing for the one piece of leverage she could have on him. Behind her, Radko vomited.
The whitecrust addict came at her from around the big man’s back—the man she had stabbed was staggering with pain, and not quite moving fast enough to kill her yet, though Laris was certain she saw her own end right there, right then.
Then Radko got the skinny one by the ankles, and he went down face-first. Nerve-wrangled and angry, the addict was too busy reaching for Laris to break his fall with his own hands. Something—several somethings—crunched inside his face instead.
She and the big man both paused a moment in their deadly dance as an eerie keen of pain rose from the Selistani. Radko broke the moment by slamming uselessly into the big man’s knee. He kicked Radko away as if shaking loose a dog, then grabbed at the knife and pulled it free in a steaming, hot-scented gush of blood.
“You and your new goddess won’t live to see the springtime.” The big man’s voice was thick with pain. He staggered into the night, one hand pressed against the wound, while the bloody knife clattered to the street.
Laris stood staring a moment, breath hard in her lungs. The whole business had taken less than a minute. She had no idea why she was not dead.
Neither did Radko, apparently. He scrambled for his knife, then gave the skinny attacker a booted kick in the fork of his legs. The keening turned to a grunt, followed by a moan.
“Enough,” said Laris. “It’s not for us to finish him off.” She extended a hand to Radko. “Let’s go.”
He burst into tears. She understood the feeling.
“Now, Radko, let’s go now.”
They hurried arm in arm through the winter darkness, Radko’s breath shuddering with his tears. When Laris glanced over her shoulder, she saw a short, lumpy figure with glowing eyes standing over the body.
Mother Iron. Her new goddess. Strange, that one, a peculiar choice after the slaying of the goddess Marya, but Desire herself—mother-goddess to them all—had spoken.
Nothing passed between them, no nod of recognition, but Laris realized her prayer had been answered after all.
At her apartment she sent Radko out for more water. They would need to wash the blood away, and look to their bruises and cuts. She hated to use another day’s ration of wood, but there didn’t seem to be another way. Besides, after paying Undine, she was four copper taels to the good. Perhaps she could spare it.
He came back with a full bucket of water and slush. Too much, really, for her poor fire, but it wouldn’t go to waste. Wordless, Laris slipped out of her outer blouse and dropped the shoulder of her underslip as she turned away from him. “Tell me if you see too much damage.”
Radko’s big, blunt hands were surprisingly tender. Cold, from washing them outside when he was fetching water, but clean and careful. He pressed fingertips into her, poked a bit. When her breath hissed with pain, his touch eased and he worked his way around the damaged area.
“You got away okay,” he finally said. Lips brushed her shoulder, setting the hairs of her neck on end and a shiver crawling down her spine.
“Thank you,” Laris replied. “How are you?”
“Aches, ma’am, but they didn’t cut me open none.”
No, she had done the cutting open. But those two would have killed as easily as stared them down. What else could she have done?
“Let me have a look,” Laris said sternly.
Radko’s face was suffused with embarrassed shyness, and she could see the boy he had once been, not so far behind his eyes. He still shivered, almost violently now. Cold? Fear? Pain?
For Solis, Laris thought, and pulled Radko into her arms. They eased back onto the narrow bed together, and lay a long time until his weeping stopped. She found herself in no mood to let loose of him, and he did not seem inclined to pull away, so they held one another through the watches of the night.
Morning found them still abed. Laris had not slept well, but Radko had positively snored the night away in her arms. They were still clothed—she was four coppers to the good, and no trace of his seed within her sweetpocket, or her more fundamental regions, to show for it. Was there a living to be made holding on to sad, silent men?
Or just this one.
Radko opened his eyes, blinked, yawned. “We never did say good-bye to Solis,” he muttered.
She kissed his forehead. “I think we already have.”
“Hmm.” A grubby finger traced her nose. “I got to work soon. What about those men?”
Laris shrugged. “They were after the goddess. She will protect, or she will perish. I survived the death of Marya, I can survive the death of Mother Iron.”
“Mother Iron’s never going to die,” Radko said with an almost-pleased finality.
The point was well taken. The new goddess was an old, old figure, surviving centuries in the tunnels beneath Copper Downs, deity from an era so long past as to be forgotten, only lately risen to her new role. Laris laughed, a little. “Then perhaps I shall never die, either.”
“Will I see you again?” he asked plaintively.
Laris glanced away at the light leaking through the shutters. Her emotions were complicated, swirling. He was not so bad. And that scent. Truly, Neela had been right. Solis had been crying for Radko.
“My work is in the evening…” The man was used to prostitutes, after mooning over Solis so long.
His face fell, so she added hastily, “But we will find a time.”
Radko struggled to his feet, smiled crookedly, and limped out her door, heading for his own day’s wage. Laris pulled her robe about her and contemplated the four copper taels and the knife on the floor next to her bed, all neatly wrapped in a scrap of lace. She did not recall doing any such thing last night. She did not even own any lace.
“Solis?” she said softly. “Mother Iron?”
There was no answer. That was good enough for Laris. She rolled back into her thin covers and breathed in Radko’s scent, then settled in for a few more hours of sleep. For the first time in months, she was ready for a quiet journey through the countries of her dreams.
Unchambered Heart
This is the story Jeff and Ann hated. Luckily for me, not everyone else did.
One of the more controversial pieces in the collection is a print by the famed forger of art, currency, and graffiti, Alois Redpath (b. Minot, North Dakota, 1936; d. Xian, China, 1994), who signed his work Redman. Redman’s most famous work, of course, was an exact replica of a section of the Berlin Wall, built overnight on a lot in East Berlin in the summer of 1965. The Stasi are said to have authorized an assassination order against the artist in retaliation, but by then he was living in a commune just outside Phuket, Thailand, beyond even the long reach of the East German secret police.
This print, known as Unchambered Heart, is said to be a copy of one of the lost paintings of Mercer Amistad (b. Taos, NM, 1934; disappeared in Papua-New Guinea, ca. 1971, possibly infected with kuru). Amistad and the infamous gray market art collector Dr. Bentley Maxon toured Europe together in 1964 and 1965, seeking medical curiosities that had been stolen by the Nazis during World War II and secreted in a series of illicit museums operated by Himmler’s notorious Section Goat. The secretive paramilitary unit was responsible for much of the Nazi psychic war effort. Himmler and his spiritual advisors placed great faith in the accrued mystical powers of such artifacts as the Bottled Siamese Twins of Turin, the Bile Ducts of St. Boniface, and the sadly distorted skeleton of that Swedish unfortunate known as the Walrus Man.
Amistad’s interest in such material ties into her long history of representing the unspeakable through the lens of art. Maxon’s pursuits at that time naturally go without saying among the cognoscenti of his life and work. We can only speculate, of course, but Amistad and Maxon could surely have met Redman somewhere in Mitteleuropa during the time their travels overlapped. Internal evidence in the print suggests it may have used another artwork or sketch as its source, which would be consistent with Redman encountering a Bohemian artist wandering Europe with her sketchbook, in the company of a mad doctor.
Controversy arises from two sources. First, the provenance of the print is dubious. Maxon’s own records regarding the piece are uncharacteristically vague, given the doctor’s more typical prolixity. This leaves open the possibility that Unchambered Heart is a forgery of a forgery, or a pseudo-copy. Second, Maxon’s interest in the print seems to be connected to his brief and unfortunate tenure with the transgressive German performance art troupe known as Golden Dusk, an episode in the good doctor’s biography for which he has more than once publicly stated his deep regret.
In other words, an unlikely vignette of which to hang a reminder in the front hall of Maxon’s Long Island conservatory.
This is the story Jeff and Ann hated. Luckily for me, not everyone else did.
One of the more controversial pieces in the collection is a print by the famed forger of art, currency, and graffiti, Alois Redpath (b. Minot, North Dakota, 1936; d. Xian, China, 1994), who signed his work Redman. Redman’s most famous work, of course, was an exact replica of a section of the Berlin Wall, built overnight on a lot in East Berlin in the summer of 1965. The Stasi are said to have authorized an assassination order against the artist in retaliation, but by then he was living in a commune just outside Phuket, Thailand, beyond even the long reach of the East German secret police.
This print, known as Unchambered Heart, is said to be a copy of one of the lost paintings of Mercer Amistad (b. Taos, NM, 1934; disappeared in Papua-New Guinea, ca. 1971, possibly infected with kuru). Amistad and the infamous gray market art collector Dr. Bentley Maxon toured Europe together in 1964 and 1965, seeking medical curiosities that had been stolen by the Nazis during World War II and secreted in a series of illicit museums operated by Himmler’s notorious Section Goat. The secretive paramilitary unit was responsible for much of the Nazi psychic war effort. Himmler and his spiritual advisors placed great faith in the accrued mystical powers of such artifacts as the Bottled Siamese Twins of Turin, the Bile Ducts of St. Boniface, and the sadly distorted skeleton of that Swedish unfortunate known as the Walrus Man.
Amistad’s interest in such material ties into her long history of representing the unspeakable through the lens of art. Maxon’s pursuits at that time naturally go without saying among the cognoscenti of his life and work. We can only speculate, of course, but Amistad and Maxon could surely have met Redman somewhere in Mitteleuropa during the time their travels overlapped. Internal evidence in the print suggests it may have used another artwork or sketch as its source, which would be consistent with Redman encountering a Bohemian artist wandering Europe with her sketchbook, in the company of a mad doctor.
Controversy arises from two sources. First, the provenance of the print is dubious. Maxon’s own records regarding the piece are uncharacteristically vague, given the doctor’s more typical prolixity. This leaves open the possibility that Unchambered Heart is a forgery of a forgery, or a pseudo-copy. Second, Maxon’s interest in the print seems to be connected to his brief and unfortunate tenure with the transgressive German performance art troupe known as Golden Dusk, an episode in the good doctor’s biography for which he has more than once publicly stated his deep regret.
In other words, an unlikely vignette of which to hang a reminder in the front hall of Maxon’s Long Island conservatory.
The venue was the basement of a pawnshop that had once served as a bank, centuries earlier. Barrel-vaulted ceilings made for small rooms separated by iron bars in the oddest places. Curious drains interrupted the floor periodically, as if the place also included “abattoir” in its résumé.
Maxon circulated easily through the curled smoke. He identified the usual marihuana, cloves, and tobaccos, but also several rarer hallucinogenic substances. By the end of the evening the crowd was going to be very wired indeed.
The performers had yet to identify themselves, so the audience mingled anonymously. Many wore domino masks or face paint to obscure their identity. Mostly young and beautiful, these were the children of Europe’s post-war money. And in truth more than a few scions of wealth built on gold fillings picked from Jewish corpses during the war.
Those latter were of more interest to him and Merce, of course. He had permitted himself to be distracted by the unusual and bizarre, as was his wont, but neither of them had lost sight of their essential objectives.
A pair of men wrapped themselves into a clinch in a dark corner—American officers from the look of their bodies and the cut of their hair. Maxon smiled indulgently. If any place might be safe from persecution, it was the moveable space that was instantiated whenever these events were held.
He pushed into the chamber where the main tank was located. It reeked of rust, saltwater, and a thick, animal musk. Ratty red velvet curtains remained drawn over the glass, but the low, sonorous rumblings from within were promising. Likewise the blood-crusted chains hanging from the ceiling. A winch had been bolted up there as well. Russian military surplus, and capable of hoisting several tons, if he was any judge.
Maxon noted a tense young man who held himself out from the increasingly drunken and naked crowd. No cameras were permitted in here, of course, but the fellow sketched furiously with charcoal pencil in a loose-bound book of foolscap paper.
Drifting over, the doctor took a look.
“Who the hell asked you?” growled the artist, covering the page with his forearm. He spoke in German, badly, with an American accent.
“No one whatsoever,” Maxon replied in the same tongue, well aware of his own overly academic diction. “But then, you did not ask for authorization. Please, indulge me. I am a student of curiosities. Ever on the edge of epiphany.”
“Redman.” The artist’s voice was grudging.
“My pardons?”
“Name’s Redman.” The young man had a truly magnificent scowl. His heavy, dark eyebrows would have given Frida Kahlo pause. He switched to English, with a decidedly Midwestern American accent. “This is the part where you tell me your made-up name, then we pretend to get along.”
“Oh, I assure you that there is nothing made up about my name.” The doctor offered his hand, for a shake or a kiss as seemed appropriate. “Bentley Y. F. Maxon. Physician, collector, world traveler.”
Redman did not take the bait, instead eyeing Maxon’s hand suspiciously for a moment. “You part of this freak show?”
Maxon put aside the temptation to say he was the freak show. In any event, that was not true. At least not here, not tonight. And youth was not to be blamed for its callowness. “I play my roles in life,” he said. “Really, I must insist you permit me to view the sketch on which you are working.”
With a final, blistering glare, Redman pulled his arm away and showed Maxon the sketchbook while still keeping a firm grip on it.
Surprisingly, the scene was not naturalistically representative of the increasingly raucous and abandoned crowd. Maxon recognized the face of the woman in the foreground. Here on paper, her breasts were pointed, each nipple exaggerated into the nosecone of a V-2 rocket. But when last he’d seen her, while she had indeed been naked, she had not been astride an orthocone cephalopod like some unicorned squid out of the depths of time. Nor had there been thousand-eyed Buddhist demons in Soviet uniforms dancing behind her.
Admittedly, anything was possible here.
Maxon glanced around to be sure. Then, “Do you plan to sketch the performance?”
“These are studies,” Redman said defensively. “Cartoons. In the old sense of the word.”
“And excellent studies they are.” He reached out to lightly grasp the young man’s elbow. “I am a patron of the arts. Please do not neglect to inform me of whatever work proceeds from your evening with us tonight.”
A few minutes later, Maxon located Mercer again. She had stripped and was painting her body with whitewash in preparation for the show. It was a surprisingly sensual process with even more surprisingly attractive results. As such Merce had drawn the attention of a portion of the crowd.
He stepped in close to speak low, pitched for her ears only. “Watch for the angry young man with the sketchbook. You should like to meet him.”
“I love artists,” Merce replied. Maxon wondered if she would use a human canvas to make her body prints tonight. If so, he had an inkling whom the woman might be rolling back and forth across.
A quiet signal from the ringmaster summoned the players to their places. Rather to his surprise, Maxon noticed Redman tucking his sketchbook away into a niche in the ancient, slime-crusted stones of a pillar and moving into position.
Really, the whole point of Golden Dusk was that you never did know.
When the red velvet parted like the lips of a woman’s vagina in the moment of passion, the thrashing tentacles within were a most satisfying sight indeed. The audience screamed.
It was only a beginning.
Three days later, a fussy little man from the Swiss embassy made Maxon’s bail. He’d seen or heard nothing about Mercer Amistead while in the custody of the volkspolizei, and had so declined to ask questions lest he draw unwanted attention to his traveling partner.
The bruises from the drubbing he’d received still smarted. The tear gas, thankfully, was only an unpleasant memory. Maxon still was uncertain whether the raid that had ended the show was planned or unplanned, but he had to admit it was a spectacular conclusion to the whole affair. He hoped the American officers had not been caught up, or at least had been fully clothed by the time they were. The U-Bahn would have saved them if they’d escaped. Courts-martial could be such a messy business.
His only regret had been his fascination with the specimens. Some of them were clearly part of what he and Merce had been searching for. Possibly even the legendary unchambered heart cross-bred between cephalopods and rodentia by Section Goat’s veterinarians.
The streets of East Berlin were as obsessively clean as ever. The air was smoggy but cold, a curious combination. As always in this season, the city was redolent with diesel fumes and the pungent aroma of boiled cabbage.
He determined to head for West Berlin and find a bierstube. Some decent food would be welcome after the GDR’s institutional hospitality.
Expunging the arrest record was a problem for later. Maxon knew he would have to take the necessary steps; otherwise the Basil Chantilly passport would be useless. He liked that identity, had taken quite some trouble building it out in the sort of elaborate and meaningless detail that made such things convincing.
Merce caught up with him near the tram line. “Enjoy your stay in the vopo hotel?” she asked with a grin, speaking Arabic to maintain some privacy for their conversation.
“Naturally,” he answered in the same language. There had been some fine specimens of abnormal psychology among his fellow prisoners. Maxon was never one to pass up an opportunity for a little field research, even under uncontrolled conditions. “I trust you managed to retain your own freedom.”
“I have just spent three marvelous days with that vile little creature you discovered at the affair.” She took Maxon’s hand.
“So at least you profited from the business in the basement.” Maxon found himself blushing, both for the messiness there, and for the lingering sense of her in the chambers of his own heart. He was not a jealous man. “I am sorry to have lost those amazing creatures in the tank. Wherever did the ringmaster find them?”
Mercer shrugged. “This is East Germany. What can’t you find here? But I do have a surprise for you.”
“I am not so fond of surprises.”
“You will like this one. I am in the midst of a painting that recaptures the spirit of that evening. Redman is drafting a pen-and-ink piece from the same theme. We shall see which you prefer.”
“Something was saved, then,” Maxon said. “Will we ever see their like again?”
“They will live forever in art,” Mercer replied joyously.
His own heart pounded anew. “So shall we all, my dear. So shall we all.”
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